Level of state test anxiety and depression were related to encoding strategy (imagery versus sematic instructions) in a study of sentence memory. Subjects were 80 female undergraduate students. Negative effects for test anxiety were found in both strategy conditions. Negative effects were found for depression when the semantic encoding strategy was used, but positive effects were found with the imagery strategy. These effects appeared to hold for both free recall and cued recall. The results suggested that different emotional states may lead to different performance outcomes, depending upon the nature of the encoding strategy employed. A quantitative effect was suggested for the emotional state of anxiety; anxiety interferes with a memory process that underlies performance in a variety of task conditions. Depression, however, appeared to have a qualitative effect; different processes were affected by the two encoding strategies, and the result varied by level of depression. (GDC)