Mood-congruent memory bias

Biological Parallel

Current emotional state primes retrieval of congruent memories because if you're threatened now, past threats matter more than past comforts. In rodents, elevated corticosterone from acute stress enhances recall of fear-conditioned memories while impairing extinction retrieval—the stressed brain surfaces defensive memories over safety signals. State-dependent memory occurs when psychological and physiological state at recall matches encoding state, improving retrieval across anxiety, fear, and depression states. This is adaptive context matching: emotional state predicts which past experiences are relevant to the current situation. A threatened mouse doesn't need memories of abundant food—it needs memories of where predators appeared last time. Mood-congruent retrieval is the brain telling memory which archives to search based on present circumstance.