Graduation Date
5-2013
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department or Program
Education
Department or Program Chair
Elizabeth Truesdell PhD
First Reader
Madalienne F. Peters, EdD
Abstract
The effect of mood on the encoding and recall of memories is crucial to create more affective classroom environments conducive to retention of academic content. The current study hypothesized that emotionally disturbed (ED) students encode less academic content then their peers due to their pervasive negative mood. In three separate conditions, 73 participants were shown a 5 min video clip to either induce a positive or negative mood or to neutralize mood. Subjects were asked to rate their mood before and after the film clip. Finally, participants were instructed to recall as many words as they could from a presented word list containing emotionally positive, negative and neutral words. A paired samples t-test demonstrated statistically significant results for mood-induction in a positive, negative, and neutral condition (p = 0.001, p = 0.004, p = 0.003, respectively), which did concur with the hypothesis. However, no statistical significance demonstrated correlation between mood and memory.