In the context of psychosis, hallucinations and delusions may be considered mood congruent (such as feelings of personal inadequacy, guilt, or worthlessness during a bipolar disorder depressive episode) or incongruent.
[1] The significance of how positive or negative associations and their represented meanings in the semantic memory networks of individuals who experience the effects of memory congruence has been demonstrated in various word association studies in which the common methodology is to take samples of individuals that represent both positive, negative and neutral affective states and determine which words they recall most when presented with words representing both positive and negative connotations.
[1] Another aspect of Bower's theory in mood-congruence in memory is that the rate of occurrence of particular emotionally represented nodes may become implicitly primed.
[2] Affective memory nodes are then able to connect to a further multitude of inferred or generalized meaning where the congruent recall may not be of a specific autobiographical event.
[3] The recall may instead form a generalized representation or prime the associations of future episodes or learning to be particularly positively or negatively biased.
The incongruence is especially particular in findings of valence asymmetry, in which those who were in a current negative mood recalled more positively associated words or memories.
[1] A proposed reason for this occurrence is that the individuals who are recalling positive memories while in negatively affective states are confounded by their personal attitudes, levels of self-esteem and their world views.
The theory of categorical conception argues that mood-congruence of current affective states and memory recall are subject to attentional strengths and deficits in category matching.
The theory of categorical conception assumes that an individual's current affective state determines what they pay attention to.