Happy mood participants will demonstrate mood-congruence and cross-modality indexed by longer response latencies for positive stimuli (positive words/happy faces). Method Participants One-hundred

and twenty-four undergraduate females signed up for the experiment in exchange for study credit. Eight participants were excluded for nonfluency in Dutch, leaving the final Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical sample of 116 female university students with a mean age of 20.9 (SD = 2.9) years. Participation was restricted to females to control for potential gender influences and Dutch fluency to control for potential confounds on the verbal-emotional Stroop task. All study participants were further Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical screened for current and past mood complaints, cognitive impairments, color vision, and dyslexia. Materials Questionnaires All participants completed the Dutch versions of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) (Van der ploeg et al. 1980), Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale (Peeters et al. 1996), and finally the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) (Bouman et al. 1985). Mood induction films and mood rating scale Mood induction movie clips consisted of Happy Feet for the positive mood and Sophie’s

Choice for the sad mood. These specific film segments have been validated and proven to be reliable Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical in previous studies (Fitzgerald et al. 2011) Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and in general, movie segments are considered a highly reliable technique for inducing mood (Westermann et al. 1996). Both the sad and happy mood induction consisted of a 12-min clip and

a 7-min clip given at two separate time intervals. Participants were instructed to identify with the protagonist in the movie and “get into the same mood.” Mood ratings were collected using a computerized visual analogue scale that ranged from −10 (indicating saddest mood) to 10 (indicating happiest mood). Color and Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical verbal-emotional Stroop A modified computerized Stroop color-naming task with emotional as well as color words was used. The Stroop consisted of five blocks of three trials each: sad words, happy words, fearful words, neutral words, and color words. A practice trial, containing 15 words selected from the different blocks, preceded the testing phase. The valenced words (from Rutecarpine a Dutch translation of the Affective Norms for English Words database, Bradley and Lang 1999) were matched for length, frequency, and learn more valence strength (see Table 1). The color trials contained the words “red,”“yellow,”“green,” and “blue.” The color block was always presented last, while the order of the other blocks was randomized across participants. The trials contained 48 words each and were sorted in four different columns. Within a block, the words were presented in a different order.