The emotional memory effect: Differential processing or item distinctiveness?

A color-naming task was followed by incidental free recall to investigate how emotional words affect attention and memory. We compared taboo, nonthreatening negative-affect, and neutral words across three experiments. As compared with neutral words, taboo words led to longer color-naming times and better memory in both within- and between-subjects designs. Color naming of negative-emotion nontaboo words was slower than color naming of neutral words only during block presentation and at relatively short interstimulus intervals (ISIs). The nontaboo emotion words were remembered better than neutral words following blocked and random presentation and at both long and short ISIs, but only in mixed-list designs. Our results support multifactor theories of the effects of emotion on attention and memory. As compared with neutral words, threatening stimuli received increased attention, poststimulus elaboration, and benefit from item distinctiveness, whereas nonthreatening emotional stimuli benefited only from increased item distinctiveness.     

Dog–human social relationship: representation of human face familiarity and emotions in the dog brain

Animal Cognition - This study investigated the behavioral and neural indices of detecting facial familiarity and facial emotions in human faces by dogs. Awake canine fMRI was used to evaluate...     

Integrated cross-domain object storage in working memory: Evidence from a verbal–spatial memory task

Working-memory theories often include domain-specific verbal and visual stores (e.g., the phonological and visuospatial buffers of Baddeley, 1986), and some also posit more general stores thought to be capable of holding verbal or visuospatial materials (Baddeley, 2000; Cowan, 2005). However, it is currently unclear which type of store is primarily responsible for maintaining objects that include components from multiple domains. In these studies, a spatial array of letters was followed by a single probe identical to an item in the array or differing systematically in spatial location, letter identity, or their combination. Concurrent verbal rehearsal suppression impaired memory in each of these trial types in a task that required participants to remember verbal–spatial binding, but did not impair memory for spatial locations if the task did not require verbal–spatial binding for a correct response. Thus, spatial information might be stored differently when it must be bound to verbal information. This suggests that a cross-domain store such as the episodic buffer of Baddeley (2000) or the focus of attention of Cowan (2001) might be used for integrated object storage, rather than the maintenance of associations between features stored in separate domain-specific buffers.     

Are you talking to me?! Separating the people from the problem when expressing emotions in negotiation

Emotions such as anger and happiness have pervasive interpersonal effects in negotiations. We propose that the nature of the effects depends on the target of the emotion, that is, whether the emotion is directed toward a person or a specific behavior. In a computer-mediated negotiation (N = 87), participants received either angry or happy messages from a simulated opponent, which were either behavior-oriented or person-directed. Behavior-oriented anger elicited larger concessions than behavior-oriented happiness, whereas person-directed anger elicited smaller concessions than person-directed happiness. This reversal could be attributed to the strategic value of the emotional expression, which was higher in the behavior-oriented condition than in the person-directed condition. These findings show that the interpersonal effects of anger and happiness depend critically on the target of the emotion.     

Memory and coping with stress: The relationship between cognitive–emotional distinctiveness,memory valence,and distress

Cognitive–emotional distinctiveness (CED), the extent to which an individual separates emotions from an event in the cognitive representation of the event, was explored in four studies. CED was measured using a modified multidimensional scaling procedure. The first study found that lower levels of CED in memories of the September 11 terrorist attacks predicted greater frequency of intrusive thoughts about the attacks. The second study revealed that CED levels are higher in negative events, in comparison to positive events and that low CED levels in emotionally intense negative events are associated with a pattern of greater event-related distress. The third study replicated the findings from the previous study when examining CED levels in participants’ memories of the 2004 Presidential election. The fourth study revealed that low CED in emotionally intense negative events is associated with worse mental health. We argue that CED is an adaptive and healthy coping feature of stressful memories.     

Orientation specificity in spatial memory: what makes a path different from a map of the path?

Three studies investigated the factors that lead spatial information to be stored in an orientation-specific versus orientation-free manner. In Experiment 1, we replicated the findings of Presson and Hazelrigg (1984) that learning paths from a small map versus learning the paths directly from viewing a world leads to different functional characteristics of spatial memory. Whether the route display was presented as the path itself or as a large map of the path did not affect how the information was stored. In Experiment 2, we examined the effects of size of stimulus display, size of world, and scale transformations on how spatial information in maps is stored and available for use in later judgments. In Experiment 3, we examined the effect of size on the orientation specificity of the spatial coding of paths that are viewed directly. The major determinant of whether spatial information was stored and used in an orientation-specific or an orientation-free manner was the size of the display. Small displays were coded in an orientation-specific way, whereas very large displays were coded in a more orientation-free manner. These data support the view that there are distinct spatial representations, one more perceptual and episodic and one more integrated and model-like, that have developed to meet different demands faced by mobile organisms.     

Cognitive Acrobatics in the Construction of Worker–mother Identity

This study uses dialectical theory to explore the interaction of worker identity (perceived financial need and job/career identity) and intensive mothering expectations in mothers’ identity construction. This study is based on extensive interviews with 98 at-home, part-time employed and full-time employed mothers of one or more pre-school children from the Midwestern United States. The narrative analysis reveals that mothers embrace intensive mothering expectations. Because of these cultural expectations, mothers must modify either societal mothering expectations or worker expectations in order to construct an integrated worker–mother identity. We found that while at-home mothers can embrace intensive mothering expectations, employed mothers engage in cognitive acrobatics to manage the tension between employment and the dominant mothering ideology. Deirdre D. Johnston is Professor of Communication and Debra H. Swanson is Professor of Sociology at Hope College. This research was funded by grants from Hope College Frost Center for Social Science Research and the Ruth M. Peale faculty development fund.     

Does anxiety affect children's reports of memory for a stressful event?

The study was conducted to explore the effects of anxiety on children's memory for a naturalistic, potentially stressful event. Eighty children of two age groups, 4-5 and 7-8 years, visited the dentist for either a teeth-cleaning check-up or an operative procedure. Anxiety was assessed by a behavioural rating scale, as well as through Likert-scale ratings by the hygienist, parent, and child. Memory for the event was elicited through free recall and specific central and peripheral questions. High anxiety had a debilitative effect on the reports of the older children, but not on young children's reports. However, experience with the dental event mediated the influence of age and anxiety on memory. Although all measures of anxiety were significantly associated with each other, only the behavioural rating scale yielded statistically reliable effects of anxiety on memory. The anxiety-memory relationship is believed to be more complex than previous research with children suggests.     

Testing the repression hypothesis: Effects of emotional valence on memory suppression in the think – No think task

It has been proposed that performance in the think – no think (TNT) task represents a laboratory analogue of the voluntary form of memory repression. The central prediction of this repression hypothesis is that performance in the TNT task will be influenced by emotional characteristics of the material to be remembered. This prediction was tested in two experiments by asking participants to learn paired associates in which the first item was either emotionally positive (e.g. joy) or emotionally negative (e.g. hatred). The second word was always emotionally neutral (e.g. socks). Consistent with the repression hypothesis, significant memory suppression was observed in both experiments following ‘no think’ instructions for memories associated with emotionally negative material. No suppression was observed for memories associated with emotionally positive information. Implications of these findings for the relationship between performance in the TNT task and the controversial notion of memory repression are considered.     

The effects of distinctiveness on memory and metamemory for face–name associations

We examined the influence of face and name distinctiveness on memory and metamemory for face–name associations. Four types of monitoring judgements were solicited during encoding and retrieval of face–name pairs that contained distinct or typical faces (Experiment 1) or names (Experiment 2). The beneficial effects of distinctiveness on associative memory were symmetrical between faces and names, such that relative to their typical counterparts, distinct faces enhanced memory for names, and distinct names enhanced memory for faces. These effects were also apparent in metamemory. Estimates of prospective and retrospective memory performance were greater for face–name associations that contained a distinct face or name compared with a typical face or name, regardless of whether the distinct item was a cue or target. Moreover, the predictive validity of prospective monitoring improved with name distinctiveness, whereas the predictive validity of retrospective monitoring improved with facial distinctiveness. Our results indicate that distinctiveness affects not only the strength of the association between a face and a name, but also the ability to monitor that association.     

Touchant-touché: the role of self-touch in the representation of body structure

The "body image" is a putative mental representation of one's own body, including structural and geometric details, as well as the more familiar visual and affective aspects. Very little research has investigated how we learn the structure of our own body, with most researchers emphasising the canonical visual representation of the body when we look at ourselves in a mirror. Here, we used non-visual self-touch in healthy participants to investigate the possibility that primary sensorimotor experience may influence cognitive representations of one's own body structure. Participants used the fingers of one hand (the 'active' hand), to touch the fingers of the other (the 'passive' hand). A conflict between the experience of the active and passive hand was introduced by experimenter interleaving their fingers with the fingers of the participant's passive hand. This led to the active hand experiencing that it touched more fingers than the passive hand felt it was being touched by. The effects on representation of body structure were assessed using an implicit measure based on Kinsbourne and Warrington's 'in-between task'. We found an underestimation of the number of fingers in the central part of the hand specifically linked to the experience of self-touch. This pattern of results corresponds to the experience of the passive hand, but not the active hand. Nevertheless, comparable reorganisation of fingers within the hand representation was found for both active and passive hands. We show that primary sensorimotor experience can modify the representation of body structure. This modification is driven by the passive experience of being touched, rather than by the active experience of touching. We believe this is the first experimental study of effects of self-touch on the mental representation of the body.     

Contraction bias in memorial quantifying judgment: does it come from a stable compressed memory representation or a dynamic adaptation process?

A common response bias in psychophysical judgments is regression toward the mean (overestimation of small and underestimation of large values, or the response contraction bias). The same bias is observed in magnitude estimation from memorized quantities. Participants estimated alphabetic interval distances between 2 letters for different levels of interletter distances. The underestimated and overestimated values and the point of least error changed, depending on the level of alphabetic distances judged; furthermore, their estimation showed a progressively increasing tendency toward the mean, rendering the estimation progressively less accurate as the estimation task was repeated. We conclude that the regression toward the mean in memorial quantifying judgment derives from a cognitive adaptation process rather than from a permanent, compressed memory representation of the stimuli. Two opposing views on the adaptive meaning of this judgment bias are discussed.     

Can emotional content reduce the age gap in visual working memory? Evidence from two tasks

Ageing is associated with declines in several cognitive abilities including working memory (WM). The goal of the present study was to assess whether emotional information could reduce the age gap in the quantity and quality (precision) of representations in visual WM. Young and older adults completed a serial image recognition (SIR) task and a colour-image binding (CIB) task. Results of the SIR task showed worse performance for negative than neutral and positive images within the older group, hence enlarging the age gap in WM. In the CIB task, recall precision was lower in the old than young adults, showing an ageing decline in the quality of WM representations. Positive images tended to improve precision, but this boost was similar for both age groups. In sum, emotional content did not reduce the age gap in visual WM.     

Longitudinal trajectories of emotions among athletes in sports competitions: Does emotional intelligence matter?

ObjectivesThis research explored whether several subgroups of athletes representing distinct emotional trajectories could be shown to exist within the latent class growth analysis (LCGA) of pleasant and unpleasant sport emotions (anger, anxiety, dejection, excitement, happiness). A secondary aim was to explore whether athletes belonging to distinct emotional trajectories reported distinct scores of trait-emotional intelligence (EI) at time 1 (T1).DesignA longitudinal three-wave measurement design (beginning, middle, and end of a competitive season) was used in the present study.MethodA sample of 460 athletes completed the sport emotion questionnaire across three measurement times and the brief emotional intelligence scale at T1.ResultsResults of LCGAs showed five trajectories for anger, anxiety and happiness, and six trajectories for dejection and excitement. Furthermore, athletes belonging to distinct (adaptive or maladaptive) trajectories reported significantly different scores of EI.ConclusionsLCGA results highlighted the athlete heterogeneity in longitudinal sport emotions. Higher scores of EI were reported by athletes belonging to adaptive emotional trajectories. These results could be used to help coaches and sport psychologists to identify athletes at risk of developing dysfunctional emotional trajectories across the competitive season. Moreover, this study suggested potential benefits of EI-centred interventions to help athletes to experience adaptive emotional trajectories. Finally, these results highlighted that heterogeneity in sport emotions must be accounted for in future research.     

Mood-congruent memory in depression: emotional priming or elaboration?

We investigated whether mood-congruent memory (MCM) bias in depression is a function of implicit or explicit memory. Implicit memory is taken as a measure of ease of activation, whereas explicit memory also taps elaboration. As expected, MCM bias was found in the explicit memory task but not in the implicit memory task. We believe this finding supports the involvement of elaborative mechanisms in MCM. In addition, memory bias was found with words related to depression but not with words denoting physical threat. Thus, the MCM bias in explicit memory was found to be specific to information that was congruent with depression rather than to all negative information.     

Adaptive memory: Is the animacy effect on memory due to emotional arousal?

Animate entities are often better remembered than inanimate ones. The proximal mechanisms underlying this animacy effect on recall are unclear. In two experiments, we tested whether the animacy effect is due to emotional arousal. Experiment 1 revealed that translations of the animate words used in the pioneering study of Nairne et al. (Psychological science, 24, 2099–2105, 2013) were perceived as being more arousing than translations of the inanimate words, suggesting that animacy might have been confounded with arousal in previous studies. In Experiment 2, new word lists were created in which the animate and inanimate words were matched on arousal (amongst several other dimensions), and participants were required to reproduce the animate and inanimate words in a free recall task. There was a tendency towards better memory for arousing items, but robust animacy effects were obtained even though animate and inanimate words were matched on arousal. Thus, while arousal may contribute to the animacy effect when it is not carefully controlled for, it cannot explain the memory advantage of animate items.     

The structured representation of information in long-term memory: A possible explanation for the accomplishments of “idiots savants”

Traditional accounts of the “idiot savant”—the development of a superior skill in otherwise subnormal individuals—are challenged through the examination of two cases, a pair of twins with extraordinary numerical ability but otherwise moronic, and Nadia, an autistic girl with extraordinary drawing ability. It is suggested that these phenomenal but particular skills are due to the functional reallocation of representational space in long-term memory. The hierarchical schematic organization of the mnemonic space, normally used for a range of conventional skills such as language, is employed instead for the hypertrophy of one-particular skill. What may appear to be feats of rapid calculation or artistic creativity actually represent automatic routings through long-term memory and translation into motor activity, possibly attributable to an unorthodox context of socialisation and social interaction. Evidence from such cases therefore proves to be inconclusive with regard to determining the nature of intelligence.     

What's in a name for memory errors? Implications and ethical issues arising from the use of the term "false memory" for errors in memory for details

The term "false memories" has been used to refer to suggestibility experiments in which whole events are apparently confabulated and in media accounts of contested memories of childhood abuse. Since 1992 psychologists have increasingly used the term "false memory" when discussing memory errors for details, such as specific words within lists. Use of the term to refer to errors in details is a shift in language away from other terms used historically (e.g., "memory intrusions"). We empirically examine this shift in language and discuss implications of the new use of the term "false memories." Use of the term presents serious ethical challenges to the data-interpretation process by encouraging over-generalization and misapplication of research findings on word memory to social issues.     

Can the memory enhancement of the survival judgment task be explained by the elaboration hypothesis?: Evidence from a memory load paradigm1

Many reports have described a survival judgment task that requires participants to judge words according to their relevance to a survival situation, eliciting better recall than that obtained in other judgment tasks (e.g., semantic or self‐judgment tasks). Two explanatory hypotheses (the adaptive hypothesis and the elaboration hypothesis) have been proposed. Here we used the memory load paradigm to investigate whether the adaptive hypothesis or the combination hypothesis can better account for the memory enhancement of the survival judgment task. We used a survival judgment task and an autobiographical recall task with the condition of no memory load or memory load. The 48 participants performed four encoding conditions (memory load—survival, no memory load—survival, memory load—autobiographical, and no memory load—autobiographical). The results showed that memory enhancement of the survival judgment task occurred only in the no memory load condition, but not in the memory load condition. Our results support the elaboration hypothesis. We also discuss the validity of the elaboration hypothesis and future directions to be pursued in this research field.     

Flexibility of working memory encoding in a sentence–picture–sound verification task

Dual-process accounts of working memory have suggested distinct encoding processes for verbal and visual information in working memory, but encoding for nonspeech sounds (e.g., tones) is not well understood. This experiment modified the sentence–picture verification task to include nonspeech sounds with a complete factorial examination of all possible stimulus pairings. Participants studied simple stimuli–pictures, sentences, or sounds–and encoded the stimuli verbally, as visual images, or as auditory images. Participants then compared their encoded representations to verification stimuli–again pictures, sentences, or sounds–in a two-choice reaction time task. With some caveats, the encoding strategy appeared to be as important or more important than the external format of the initial stimulus in determining the speed of verification decisions. Findings suggested that: (1) auditory imagery may be distinct from verbal and visuospatial processing in working memory; (2) visual perception but not visual imagery may automatically activate concurrent verbal codes; and (3) the effects of hearing a sound may linger for some time despite recoding in working memory. We discuss the role of auditory imagery in dual-process theories of working memory.