The contribution of relatedness and distinctiveness to emotionally-enhanced memory (original) (raw)
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The role of attention and relatedness in emotionally enhanced memory
Emotion, 2007
Examining the positive and negative pictures separately revealed that emotionally enhanced memory (EEM) for positive pictures was mediated by attention, with no significant influence of emotional arousal, whereas the reverse was true of negative pictures. Consistent with this finding, in Experiment 2 EEM for negative pictures was found even when task emphasis was manipulated so that equivalent attention was allocated to negative and neutral pictures. The results show that attention and semantic relatedness contribute to EEM, with the extent varying with emotional valence. Negative emotion can influence memory independently of these 2 factors.
Accounting for immediate emotional memory enhancement
Journal of Memory and Language, 2011
Memory for emotional events is usually very good even when tested shortly after study, before it is altered by the influence of emotional arousal on consolidation. Immediate emotion-enhanced memory may stem from the influence of emotion on cognitive processes at encoding and retrieval. Our goal was to test which cognitive factors are necessary and sufficient to account for EEM, with a specific focus on clarifying the contribution of attention to this effect. In two experiments, participants encoded negative-arousing and neutral pictures. In Experiment 1, under divided-attention conditions, negative pictures were better attended and recalled even when they were matched with neutral pictures on semantic relatedness and distinctiveness, and attention at encoding predicted subsequent emotion-enhanced memory. The memory advantage for emotional stimuli was only abolished when attention to emotional and neutral stimuli was also matched, under full-attention in Experiment 1 and under divided-attention in Experiment 2. Emotional memory enhancement was larger in Experiment 1 when the control of organization and distinctiveness was relaxed. These findings suggest that attention, organization and distinctiveness provide a necessary and sufficient account for immediate emotion-enhanced free recall memory.► Attention, organization and distinctiveness are necessary and sufficient to account for enhanced memory for emotional stimuli. ► When attention to emotional and neutral stimuli is equivalent, memory for these stimuli is equivalent. ► Attention only mediated the effects of emotional arousal on memory when primary distinctiveness was controlled.
Reconciling findings of emotion-induced memory enhancement and impairment of preceding items
Emotion, 2009
A large body of work has revealed that people remember emotionally arousing information better than neutral information. However, previous research has revealed contradictory effects of emotional events on memory for neutral events that precede or follow them: In some studies, emotionally arousing items have impaired memory for immediately preceding or following items, and in others arousing items enhanced memory for preceding items. By demonstrating both emotion-induced enhancement and impairment, Experiments 1 and 2 clarified the conditions under which these effects are likely to occur. The results suggest that emotion-induced enhancement is most likely to occur for neutral items that (a) precede (and so are poised to predict the onset of) emotionally arousing items, (b) have high attentional weights at encoding, and (c) are tested after a delay period of a week rather than within the same experimental session. In contrast, emotion-induced impairment is most likely to occur for neutral items near the onset of emotional arousal that are overshadowed by highly activated competing items during encoding.
Journal of Memory and Language, 2007
Two different types of trade-offs have been discussed with regard to memory for emotional information: A trade-off in the ability to remember the gist versus the visual detail of emotional information, and a trade-off in the ability to remember the central emotional elements of an event versus the nonemotional (peripheral) elements of that same event. The present study examined whether these two trade-offs interact with one another when participants study scenes that elicit an emotional response due to the inclusion of a negative visually arousing object. Participants studied scenes composed of a negative or a neutral object placed on a background. Their memory was then tested for the ''gist'' and visual detail of the objects and the backgrounds. The results revealed that there is a pervasive memory trade-off for central emotional versus peripheral nonemotional elements of scenes. With some encoding tasks, a trade-off for gist versus visual detail also resulted, but this trade-off occurred only when memory for the nonemotional background of a scene was assessed. There was no gist/detail trade-off for the emotional objects in a scene.
The effects of emotion and encoding strategy on associative memory.
Research has demonstrated that when discrete pieces of information are integrated together at encoding-imagining two items together as a single entity, for example-there is a mnemonic benefit for their relationship. A separate body of literature has indicated that the presence of emotional information can have an impact on the binding of associated neutral details, in some cases facilitating associative binding (MacKay et al. Memory and Cognition 32:474-488, 2004; Mather, Perspectives on Psychological Science 2:33-52, 2007), and in other cases impeding the processing of associated details (Easterbrook, Psychological Review 66:183-201, 1959; Kensinger, Emotion Review 1:99-113, 2009). In the present experiments, we investigated how memory for neutral words is affected by the emotionality of the information with which they are presented (whether with an emotional word or a second neutral word) and the encoding context (integrated or nonintegrated strategy). Participants viewed word pairs and were instructed to visualize the items as an integrated unit or to visualize them separately from one another. The results of Experiment 1 showed a disproportionate mnemonic benefit for neutral items that were integrated with other neutral items over those integrated with emotional items. The results of Experiments 2A and 2B showed that this effect interacted with encoding time: When given 2 s to encode, participants showed no effect of integration on memory for neutral-neutral pairs, but showed a significant mnemonic benefit for integrating emotional-neutral pairs. When given 4 or 6 s, the integrative benefit increased significantly for neutral-neutral pairs but decreased for emotional-neutral pairs. These results suggest that creating an integrated mental image of two neutral items requires a more time-consuming process than integrating an emotional and a neutral item, but that extra effort may result in a downstream mnemonic benefit.
Memory & Cognition, 1992
Recent experiments have implied that emotional arousal causes a narrowing of attention and, therefore, impoverished memory encoding. In contrast, other studies have found that emotional arousal enhances memory for all aspects of an event. We report two experiments investigating whether these differing results are due to the different retention intervals employed in past studies or to their different categorization schemes for the to-be-remembered material. Our results indicate a small role for retention interval in moderating emotion's effects on memory. However, emotion had markedly different impacts on different types of material: Emotion improved memory for gist and basic-level visual information and for plot-irrelevant details associated, both temporally and spatially, with the event's center. In contrast, emotion undermined memory for details not associated with the event's center. The mechanisms for emotion's effects are discussed. The emotional events in one's life tend to be remembered with great clarity and detail (e.g.,
Emotional content enhances true but not false memory for categorized stimuli
Memory & Cognition, 2013
Past research has shown that emotion enhances true memory, but that emotion can either increase or decrease false memory. Two theoretical possibilities-the distinctiveness of emotional stimuli and the conceptual relatedness of emotional content-have been implicated as being responsible for influencing both true and false memory for emotional content. In the present study, we sought to identify the mechanisms that underlie these mixed findings by equating the thematic relatedness of the study materials across each type of valence used (negative, positive, or neutral). In three experiments, categorically bound stimuli (e.g., funeral, pets, and office items) were used for this purpose. When the encoding task required the processing of thematic relatedness, a significant true-memory enhancement for emotional content emerged in recognition memory, but no emotional boost to false memory (Exp.