The Effect of Mood and Reading Habits on Short Term Memory

Introduction
The purpose of this experiment was to determine if being in a positive or negative mood influences how much a person can store in short term memory as a function of reading habits. Previous studies have shown that what a person remembers is effected by their emotions. The person will remember more negative things if they are in a negative mood and more positive things is they are in a positive mood. One study showed that subjects were less able to recognize negative facial expressions and better able to recognize positive facial expressions after a course of antidepressants ( Goodwin, 2004)

Introduction
More studies have looked at what a person remembers when the are in a specific mood, not how much they remember which this study looked at. Literature has show that reading has many benefits including helping cognitive developments. One particular study looked the benefits of reading for children with Down Syndrome and the effects it had on their cognitive development. It was mostly found to increase performance (Cuskelly, 2002) There has been little research done on specifically what good and bad reading habits do to short term memory

Introduction
In the experiment it was hypothesized that people in a positive mood will be able to perform better than a person in a negative mood on a recall test It was also hypothesized that people with good reading habits will perform better on recall test than a person with poor reading habits Subjects that have both a positive mood and good reading habits should also be able to perform better than those that have negative mood and poor reading habits

Method
The experiment involved 15 subjects (4 male and 11 female) who were students and Central Michigan University The only requirements were that the subjects be 18 years of age or older

Method
The experiment packet included a consent forms, experiment instructions, a demographic questionnaire, a survey about the subjects current mood, a survey about the subjects reading habits, a list of 24 study words for the recall test, and the actual recall test

Method
Subjects were asked to fill out the demographic questionnaire and the mood and reading surveys They were then asked to study the list of 24 words included in the experiment packet for four minutes with the help of cue words The subjects then wrote down as many of the words that they could recall on a separate piece of paper that was also included in the packet. The results were then calculated

Positive mood had greater mean recall scores than negative mood, regardless of their reading history
80

Mean Recall Score

75 70 65 60 Positive Negative

MOOD

Reading frequently resulted in greater mean recall scores than reading less frequently, regardless of their mood state
85
Mean Recall Score

80 75 70 65 60 High
READING HISTORY

Low

Effect of reading history on mean recall scores was greater in negative mood than in positive mood
90
Mean Recall Score

80 70 60 50 High
READING HISTORY

Positive Negative
Low

Results
In the experiment it was found that positive mood had greater mean recall scores than negative mood, regardless of what the subjects reading history was Having good reading habits resulted in greater mean recall scores than having poor reading habits, regardless of their state of mood It was also found that effect of reading history on mean recall scores was greater in negative mood than in positive mood

Discussion
The most important findings of the experiment were that reading history had a greater impact on recall scores when the subject was in a negative mood rather than a positive mood, however these results were not found to be significant, but it showed strong trends The fact that subjects with a positive mood had greater mean recall scores than subjects in a negative mood, and that good reading habits also resulted in a greater mean recall score than poor reading habits also showed strong trends

Discussion
To find significant results the experiment could have used a larger number of subjects, 15 subjects is a very small sample size Using all Central Michigan students is also not representative of the population, all the subjects were of 18-23 years of age, and had similar demographic backgrounds It is difficult to assume that all the subjects were completely truthful in describing their current mood, and determining their past and present reading habits Different questions could have also been asked in determining if the subjects had good or bad reading habits

Discussion
The results of this experiment shows the importance of being in a positive mood for short term memory performance and the importance of being in a positive mood for many other things Also the fact that reading habits had a stronger effect on recall scores in negative mood than in a positive mood further shows the importance of being in a positive mood These findings help show the importance in emphasizing mood in school programs to help increase performance, possibly even to increase job performance, and maybe even to help people with learning disabilities increase their cognitive abilities

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the subjects that participated in my experiment and helped me achieve my results I would also like to thank Dr. Justin Oh-Lee for all his assistance with the idea of my experiment, helping setting up the experiment, and interpreting the results