Biomedical subjects

H C Ellis

Publications and source records attributed to H C Ellis.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1998

Cognitive activity and physiological arousal: processes that mediate mood-congruent memory.

This research proposes that the cognitive activity associated with the experience of an emotional state mediates the occurrence of mood-congruent processing. Two experiments examined the role of cognitive activity in selective processing of words in a mood congruence paradigm. Four induction procedures were used: a depressed-mood induction, a schema induction organized around the theme of writing a paper, an arousal induction, and a control neutral-mood induction. The memory task consisted of recalling a word list composed of negatively associated and thematically organized words. Selective processing was demonstrated in conjunction with the depressed-mood and organizational-schema induction procedures. In contrast, the arousal and neutral induction procedures did not produce selective processing of words from the list. The findings support the thesis that cognitive activity mediates the selective processing typical of mood congruence as distinct from arousal processes per se. The findings are discussed with respect to the resource allocation model and semantic network theory.

Affect↗

PubMed1997

Emotion, motivation, and text comprehension: the detection of contradictions in passages.

The authors investigated the effects of experimentally induced mood states on the identification of contradictions in text passages and ratings of comprehension in 3 experiments. Mood impaired comprehension in college students across a variety of passages, as evidenced by a depressive impairment in contradiction identification and an increased number of false identifications among depressed participants. Additionally, depressed individuals were less accurate in their judgments of passage difficulty. These findings are consistent with the resource allocation model of mood effects, which attributes impaired comprehension to the activation of intrusive, irrelevant thoughts during reading of the passage. It is further argued that these results cannot be explained simply by a deficit in motivation of the depressed participants.

Adult↗

PubMed1992

Paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenic processing of facially displayed affect.

It was proposed that differences between paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics in the processing of affective information may reflect underlying differences in their schema for emotion-laden information. Performances of 14 paranoid schizophrenics, 13 nonparanoid schizophrenics, and 15 matched controls were compared on a facial affect judgment task, and a matched control task comprising geometric figures largely devoid of emotional information. Subjects were required to rate friendliness, select an emotion label, and subsequently to remember the stimuli. Nonparanoids were deficient in overall labeling of facial affect, suggesting a weak cognitive schema for emotional information. The paranoids were particularly more accurate than the nonparanoids at labeling the negative facial affects, suggesting well-developed negative emotional aspects in their cognitive schema. Unexpectedly, nonparanoids relative to paranoids displayed a greater memory deficit in the recognition of geometric figures than in the recognition of faces. The nonparanoid deficit suggests these subjects may have poorly organized schema for remembering less structured nonverbal information. The findings support the idea of fundamental cognitive processing differences between paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenia.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

Focused attention and depressive deficits in memory.

Hertel and Rude (1991) investigated the effects of depression on memory for words in a sentence completion task. They found that depressive deficits in memory can be eliminated by procedures that increase depressed Ss' focused attention to the task. Three areas are considered in this article: irrelevant thoughts, distraction, and inhibition.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

Irrelevant thoughts, emotional mood states, and cognitive task performance.

In two experiments, we investigated the relationship shared by irrelevant thoughts, emotional mood states, and cognitive task performance. At an empirical level, irrelevant thoughts were defined as thoughts that did not facilitate successful task performance. We used the same general procedure for both experiments: three groups of college students received happy-, neutral-(control), or sad-mood inductions and performed a memory task. The procedure for obtaining thoughts varied between experiments. The subjects in Experiment 1 listed their thoughts after the memory recall task. In Experiment 2, the subjects were tape-recorded while performing a memory task and producing concurrent verbal protocols. The subjects in both experiments then judged their thoughts in terms of frequency, intensity, and irrelevance. We found a similar pattern of results in both experiments: (1) The proportions of irrelevant thoughts and recall performance were negatively related, and (2) happy and sad students produced reliably greater proportions of irrelevant thoughts than did neutral (control) students.

Adult↗

PubMed1990

Depressive deficits in memory: processing initiative and resource allocation.

Hertel and Hardin investigated the effects of depressed mood states on recognition memory in three experiments. They report that mood effects on memory depend on the subjects' awareness of the task. Four issues are considered in this article: natural and induced moods, processing initiative, initiative versus resource allocation, and strategies.

Adult↗

PubMed1985

Emotional mood states and retrieval in episodic memory.

The effect of an experimentally induced depressed mood state on recall of target words embedded in sentences was examined. The objective was to determine if the induction of a depressed mood can affect output or retrieval from episodic memory. The experimental sequence was as follows: All subjects studied a list of either elaborated or base sentences, rating them for complexity, in an incidental retention paradigm; this was followed by the induction of a depressed or neutral (control) mood, using a standard and a short form of the Velten mood induction procedure; finally, subjects were given an unanticipated cued recall test of the target adjectives. In all tests, subjects showed a reduction in recall owing to the depressed mood, which provided evidence for retrieval effects of the mood state. Elaboration led to superior recall of target items, and there was no effect of delayed recall. The results are briefly discussed within the framework of a resource allocation theory.

Cues↗

PubMed1984

Emotional mood states and memory: elaborative encoding, semantic processing, and cognitive effort.

The effects of experimentally induced mood states on recall of target words embedded in sentences or alone were examined in three experiments. All experiments focused on the role of a depressed-mood induction on recall and looked at the effects of elaborative encoding, semantic processing, or cognitive effort. The overall effect of the depressed-mood state was to reduce recall in all three situations; however, the opportunity to process information semantically still led to superior recall in the depressed condition. In contrast, the superiority of recall of high-effort items disappeared in the depressed condition, suggesting that subjects may differentially allocate resources when under a depressed-mood state. The results are briefly discussed within the framework of a resource allocation theory.

Affect↗

PubMed1974