Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, Vol. 25, No. 1, March 2003 ( C  2003) A Negative Mood Induction Procedure With Efﬁcacy Across Repeated Administrations in Women Suzanna Hernandez, 1 Jillon S. Vander Wal, 1,2 and Bonnie Spring 1 Accepted September 28, 2002 Although several experimental techniques are effective in inducing negative mood, none has estab- lished efﬁcacy over repeated testing. The lack of mood induction tools validated across repeated administrations impedes study of emotional changes in the same individual over time. A brief, sad mood induction combining music and an autobiographical memory was administered to 17 women on 6 occasions (two 3-day sets over a 2-week period of time). Mood was measured before and after the induction procedure. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed that the induction produced a large increase in POMS depression (d = 1.48) that recurred consistently across all testing days. A brief negative mood induction combining music and autobiographical memory appears suitable for use in studies that involve repeated administrations. KEY WORDS: mood induction; negative affect; depression; repeated measures. Procedures that experimentally alter emotional state have important research and clinical applications. Mood induction has been a cornerstone of research on exper- imental psychopathology (Ingram & Ritter, 2000) and personality psychology (Gilboa-Schechtman, Revelle, & Gotlib, 2000; Gomez, Cooper, & Gomez, 2000). Usually, mood has served as the independent variable whose ef- fect on a psychological process is examined. Examples include studies comparing the inﬂuence of different moods (e.g., negative vs. positive vs. neutral) on autobiograph- ical memory, selective attention, priming, or startle re- sponses. When the phenomenon under study is emotional regulation, however, mood becomes the dependent vari- able. Relevant research questions concern, for example, the effects of rumination versus distraction on depressed mood (Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1993) or the effects of nicotine versus placebo on negative mood (Kassel & Unrod, 2000). Ideally, such questions would be answered precisely and efﬁciently via the use of within-participants research designs in which the same participant underwent mood induction on more than one occasion while engag- 1 University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 2 To whom correspondence should be addressed at Center for Health Re- search (Room 318), Wayne State University, 5557 Cass Avenue, Detroit, Michigan 48202, 313-577-2548; e-mail: jvanderwal@wayne.edu. ing in different self-regulatory strategies to determine the effect on mood. One barrier to such research, however, has been a lack of evidence that any mood induction proce- dure retains its efﬁcacy across repeated administrations, rather than eliciting habituation or idiosyncratic response changes. To date, the lack of mood induction procedures that are validated for repeated administration has forced investigators to use between-participants designs that in- duce mood only one time. Several psychological procedures with established efﬁcacy for inducing negative moods (Westermann, Spies, Stahl, & Hesse, 1996) vary in how well they appear to lend themselves to repeated administrations. Films or sto- ries are very effective mood inducers (Gerrards-Hesse, Kordelia, & Hesse, 1994), but once the plot has been re- vealed, seeing a ﬁlm or hearing a story for the second time is inevitably different from experiencing it initially. Another effective mood induction procedure is the Velten Protocol, in which participants read standardized posi- tive and negative self-statements (Kenealy, 1986; Larsen & Sinnett, 1991). A difﬁculty with the Velten proce- dure, however, is that people who lack a propensity to- ward depressogenic ideation can self-exempt themselves from mood induction by dismissing the irrational, depres- sive self-statements as “silly” or “sick” (Cash, Rimm, & MacKinnon, 1986). That bias may help to account for 49 0882-2689/03/0300-0049/0 C  2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation