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People sometimes cope with negative moods by retrieving positive memories, thus exhibiting a mood-incongruency effect. It was proposed that this type of motivated recall involves a 2-stage process: Individuals must first openly acknowledge their negative moods before they will adopt a recall strategy to alleviate their distress. Individual differences in affect acknowledgment (repression-sensitization, meta-mood beliefs, etc.) should therefore predict the occurrence of mood-incongruent recall. The results of 3 studies supported this hypothesis. Studies 1 and 2 revealed that sensitizers (but not repressors) reported more negative affect, and hence recruited more positive memories, after a negative mood induction than after a neutral mood induction. In Study 3, the same recall effects emerged when a more direct measure of affect acknowledgment, meta-mood beliefs, was used as a moderator.
McFarland et al. (Tue,) studied this question.