When attempting to discover the biological factors that influence mood, it is difficult to find scientific proofs.
[2] The James–Lange theory, seen by many as his masterwork, lost favor in the 20th century, but has regained popularity more recently due largely to theorists such as John Cacioppo, António Damásio, Joseph E. LeDoux and Robert Zajonc who are able to appeal to neurological evidence.
If distinguished from reactive responses of reptiles, emotions would then be mammalian elaborations of general vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (for example, dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures, and postures.
This hypothesis that synaptic plasticity is an important part of the neural mechanisms underlying learning and memory is now widely accepted.
Written in 1958, Donald Eric Broadbent's Perception and Communication was the first book entirely devoted to human information processing.
This book introduced the notion of several distinct kinds of storage systems (memories) of limited capacity and of attention as a mechanism for filtering incoming information.
External events are physical occurrences experienced in a human's environment, such as receiving a gift or encountering a friend.
Subjects were asked to describe their current mood, and then listened to classical music chosen to instigate either happiness or sadness.
[6] Although the source of an event seems to play a part in the occurrence of mood dependent memory, it is not the only relevant factor.
First, though emotions retrieve past information, one cannot decipher between positive and negative moods in this particular approach.
In Balch and Lewis’ article, they studied how the participants’ moods were affected by the change in tempo of a musical piece.
The participants were each given a list of words to read while music played in the background, with varying tempos distributed randomly.