Personality moderators of mood congruency effects on cognition: the role of self-esteem and negative mood regulation.

The authors report 3 experiments on negative mood regulation in which whether mood-congruency or mood-incongruency effects of negative mood on cognition were observed was dependent on an individual's self-esteem (SE). We found that most of our 224 participants tended toward mood-congruent recall under control conditions in which mood was relatively neutral. However, when a negative emotional state was induced, participants low in SE exhibited mood-congruent recall, but high-SE participants did not. In fact, the more negative high-SE participants felt, the more positive were their cognitions (mood-incongruent recall). This pattern was replicated in 3 experiments that included variations in the negative mood inductions and the type of information that was generated or retrieved. Our results suggest a strong link between SE and the regulation of negative emotional states.