Memory for emotional words in sentences: The importance of emotional contrast

Numerous researchers have demonstrated that emotional words are remembered better than neutral words. However, the effect has been attributed to factors other than emotion because it is somewhat fragile and influenced by variables such as the experimental designs employed. To investigate the role of emotion per se in memory for emotional words, negative-affect but low arousal emotional words were placed in sentence contexts that either activated high emotional meanings of the words (Shane died in his car last night.), or low emotional meanings of the words (Shane's old car died last night). The high-emotional contexts led to better memory than the low-emotional contexts, but only in mixed lists of emotional and neutral words. Additionally, the traditional emotional memory effect was also limited to mixed lists. The results are consistent with the idea that an emotional contrast is responsible for the emotional memory effect with low arousal emotional words.     

Memory for emotional words in sentences: the importance of emotional contrast

Numerous researchers have demonstrated that emotional words are remembered better than neutral words. However, the effect has been attributed to factors other than emotion because it is somewhat fragile and influenced by variables such as the experimental designs employed. To investigate the role of emotion per se in memory for emotional words, negative-affect but low arousal emotional words were placed in sentence contexts that either activated high emotional meanings of the words (Shane died in his car last night.), or low emotional meanings of the words (Shane's old car died last night). The high-emotional contexts led to better memory than the low-emotional contexts, but only in mixed lists of emotional and neutral words. Additionally, the traditional emotional memory effect was also limited to mixed lists. The results are consistent with the idea that an emotional contrast is responsible for the emotional memory effect with low arousal emotional words.     

Collaborative remembering of emotional events: The case of Rabin's assassination

Individual and collaborative remembering of the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister, Itzhak Rabin, were compared. In line with previous laboratory findings on memory of neutral stimuli, it was hypothesised that collaborative remembering (three individuals reaching a common response) and nominal remembering (three individual responses pooled together) of the assassination would be more accurate than individual remembering. A total of 146 participants responded (115 individually and 120 in groups of three) to open-ended and multiple-choice questionnaires (among them, 89 responded twice with a week of intertest interval) about Rabin's assassination and the events that preceded and followed it. Data analysis showed that the collaborative responses to the open-ended questionnaire contained more details (both accurate and inaccurate) than the individual responses, and that the responses to the multiple-choice questionnaire were more accurate than the individual responses. However, the collaborative responses contained fewer details (both accurate and inaccurate) than the nominal responses. Responses to the two questionnaires were more accurate on the retest when they followed collaborative rather than individual responses on the original test. The inferiority of the collaborative relative to the nominal remembering was attributed to collaborative inhibition, whereas the positive effect of collaborative remembering on performance on the retest was attributed to the contribution of contextual cues.     

When remembering the past suppresses memory for future actions

Remembering planned actions at the correct time in the future is an integral component of prospective cognition. Recent studies on future remembering have led to suggestions that prospective cognition might be based on past experience. To test this hypothesis, we focused on retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF), which usually indicates that remembering past events suppresses memory for related but different past events. The current study assessed RIF in two kinds of event-based prospective memory (PM) tasks using either focal or non-focal cues for ongoing tasks. Participants studied six members from each of eight taxonomic categories and then practiced recalling three of the six members from four of the eight categories using category-stem cues. This retrieval practice suppressed the detection of non-practiced members of the practiced categories during the PM task with non-focal cues (Experiment 1) but not with focal cues (Experiment 2). The results suggest that recall of certain items inhibits the function of the others as PM cues, but only if the PM task does not largely share its processing with the ongoing task.     

Collaborative remembering of emotional events: the case of Rabin's assassination

Individual and collaborative remembering of the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister, Itzhak Rabin, were compared. In line with previous laboratory findings on memory of neutral stimuli, it was hypothesised that collaborative remembering (three individuals reaching a common response) and nominal remembering (three individual responses pooled together) of the assassination would be more accurate than individual remembering. A total of 146 participants responded (115 individually and 120 in groups of three) to open-ended and multiple-choice questionnaires (among them, 89 responded twice with a week of intertest interval) about Rabin's assassination and the events that preceded and followed it. Data analysis showed that the collaborative responses to the open-ended questionnaire contained more details (both accurate and inaccurate) than the individual responses, and that the responses to the multiple-choice questionnaire were more accurate than the individual responses. However, the collaborative responses contained fewer details (both accurate and inaccurate) than the nominal responses. Responses to the two questionnaires were more accurate on the retest when they followed collaborative rather than individual responses on the original test. The inferiority of the collaborative relative to the nominal remembering was attributed to collaborative inhibition, whereas the positive effect of collaborative remembering on performance on the retest was attributed to the contribution of contextual cues.     

Response bias in "remembering" emotional stimuli: a new perspective on age differences

Older adults sometimes show a recall advantage for emotionally positive, rather than neutral or negative, stimuli (S. T. Charles, M. Mather, & L. L. Carstensen, 2003). In contrast, younger adults respond "old" and "remember" more often to negative materials in recognition tests. For younger adults, both effects are due to response bias changes rather than to enhanced memory accuracy (S. Dougal & C. M. Rotello, 2007). We presented older and younger adults with emotional and neutral stimuli in a remember-know paradigm. Signal-detection and model-based analyses showed that memory accuracy did not differ for the neutral, negative, and positive stimuli, and that "remember" responses did not reflect the use of recollection. However, both age groups showed large and significant response bias effects of emotion: Younger adults tended to say "old" and "remember" more often in response to negative words than to positive and neutral words, whereas older adults responded "old" and "remember" more often to both positive and negative words than to neutral stimuli.     

Attention during memory retrieval enhances future remembering

Memory retrieval is a powerful learning event that influences whether an experience will be remembered in the future. Although retrieval can succeed in the presence of distraction, dividing attention during retrieval may reduce the power of remembering as an encoding event. In the present experiments, participants studied pictures of objects under full attention and then engaged in item recognition and source memory retrieval under full or divided attention. Two days later, a second recognition and source recollection test assessed the impact of attention during initial retrieval on long-term retention. On this latter test, performance was superior for items that had been tested initially under full versus divided attention. More importantly, even when items were correctly recognized on the first test, divided attention reduced the likelihood of subsequent recognition on the second test. The same held true for source recollection. Additionally, foils presented during the first test were also less likely to be later recognized if they had been encountered initially under divided attention. These findings demonstrate that attentive retrieval is critical for learning through remembering.     

The rosy side and the blue side of emotional brand attachment

This paper examines the rosy side (positive emotion) and the blue side (negative emotion) of brand attachment in consumer–brand relationships and their distinct motivational triggers. Adopting attachment theory, self‐determination theory, and the relationship investment model, this paper provides a richer understanding of the positivity and negativity of emotional brand attachment in terms of consequential branding outcomes. Two hierarchical constructs—autonomous and controlled motivations—are proposed and examined using partial least squares path modelling. Data were collected through a 3‐stage survey to gain 507 samples of customers' brand attachments to 9 international car brands. This research reveals that customers' positive‐side (rosy‐side) emotional brand attachments are driven by autonomous motivations including satisfying the intrinsic motivation of pursuing pleasure and fulfilling needs for self‐determination and self‐congruence in the car brand consumption context. Customers' negative‐side (blue‐side) emotional brand attachment reflects feelings of separation distress, anxiety, and sadness that are triggered by their controlled motivations in car brand consumption contexts. The results indicate that positive emotions (the rosy side) of brand attachment are a more effective predictor of brand repurchasing intentions and word‐of‐mouth behaviours than are negative emotions (the blue side) of brand attachment. This study applies Deci and Ryan's autonomous and controlled motivations to explain the positivity and negativity of consumers' emotional brand attachment in brand–consumer relationships.     

Visual perspective in remembering and episodic future thought

According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, remembering and episodic future thinking are supported by a common set of constructive processes. In the present study, we directly addressed this assertion in the context of third-person perspectives that arise during remembering and episodic future thought. Specifically, we examined the frequency with which participants remembered past events or imagined future events from third-person perspectives. We also examined the different viewpoints from which third-person perspective events were remembered or imagined. Although future events were somewhat more likely to be imagined from a third-person perspective, the spatial viewpoint distributions of third-person perspectives characterizing remembered and imagined events were highly similar. These results suggest that a similar constructive mechanism may be at work when people remember events from a perspective that could not have been experienced in the past and when they imagine events from a perspective that could not be experienced in the future. The findings are discussed in terms of their consistency with—and as extensions of—the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis.     

Facing the future: Memory as an evolved system for planning future acts

All organisms capable of long-term memory are necessarily oriented toward the future. We propose that one of the most important adaptive functions of long-term episodic memory is to store information about the past in the service of planning for the personal future. Because a system should have especially efficient performance when engaged in a task that makes maximal use of its evolved machinery, we predicted that future-oriented planning would result in especially good memory relative to other memory tasks. We tested recall performance of a word list, using encoding tasks with different temporal perspectives (e.g., past, future) but a similar context. Consistent with our hypothesis, future-oriented encoding produced superior recall. We discuss these findings in light of their implications for the thesis that memory evolved to enable its possessor to anticipate and respond to future contingencies that cannot be known with certainty.     

Narrative self and high risk for schizophrenia: remembering the past and imagining the future

ABSTRACT

We examined the narrative self of those at high psychometric risk for schizophrenia (HR). Eighty undergraduate students wrote personal narratives about a turning-point event in their life, and about a possible future. The turning-point narratives were coded for topic, specificity, event valence, valence of causal coherence link, overall level of causal coherence, and agency. The future narratives were coded for the number and valence of goals, topic of goals, and specificity of goals. Word count was applied to all narratives. The HR group expressed lower levels of agency and a trend of lower levels of causal coherence when narrating turning-point events. When imagining their futures, HR participants produced shorter narratives and showed a trend of having fewer goals. Including the dimensions of both the turning point and the future narratives revealed that the HR group membership was best predicted by lower levels of agency and of causal coherence in the turning-point narrative, and fewer words in the future narrative. Narratives differed specifically in those few elements that are critical for the achievement of narrative continuity. Consistent with the theory, people at high risk for schizophrenia already present, to some extent, an impoverishment in their narrative sense of self.     

Accumulating and remembering the details of neutral and emotional natural scenes

In contrast to our rich sensory experience with complex scenes in everyday life, the capacity of visual working memory is thought to be quite limited. Here our memory has been examined for the details of naturalistic scenes as a function of display duration, emotional valence of the scene, and delay before test. Individual differences in working memory and long-term memory for pictorial scenes were examined in experiment 1. The accumulation of memory for emotional scenes and the retention of these details in long-term memory were investigated in experiment 2. Although there were large individual differences in performance, memory for scene details generally exceeded the traditional working memory limit within a few seconds. Information about positive scenes was learned most quickly, while negative scenes showed the worst memory for details. The overall pattern of results was consistent with the idea that both short-term and long-term representations are mixed together in a medium-term 'online' memory for scenes.     

Memory bias for emotional facial expressions in major depression

Sixteen clinically depressed patients and sixteen healthy controls were presented with a set of emotional facial expressions and were asked to identify the emotion portrayed by each face. They, were subsequently given a recognition memory test for these faces. There was no difference between the groups in terms of their ability to identify emotion between from faces. All participants identified emotional expressions more accurately than neutral expressions, with happy expressions being identified most accurately. During the recognition memory phase the depressed patients demonstrated superior memory for sad expressions, and inferior memory for happy expressions, relative to neutral expressions. Conversely, the controls demonstrated superior memory for happy expressions, and inferior memory for sad expressions, relative to neutral expressions. These results are discussed in terms of the cognitive model of depression proposed by Williams, Watts, MacLeod, and Mathews (1997).     

Collective mental time travel: remembering the past and imagining the future together

Synthese - Bringing research on collective memory together with research on episodic future thought, Szpunar and Szpunar (Mem Stud 9(4):376–389, 2016) have recently developed the concept of...     

Memory,emotional processing,and anxiety: A critique

This article explores evidence for an emotional processing view of the role of memory in anxiety disorders. It is argued that Lang (1977) and Foa and Kozak’s (1985) emotional processing hypothesis is adequate to account for mechanisms involved in most anxiety syndromes, but is less suitable for explaining persistent fear behavior in Panic Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. An alternative explanation for these disorders is provided.     

Memory errors on emotional lures: Is it possible to mistake a positive stimulus for a negative one?

This study examined whether it is possible for people to mistakenly recognise a stimulus of one emotional valence through exposure to stimuli with another emotional valence that share orthographical relatedness. Across three experiments, the recognition error rates for emotionally distinctive lures were lower than for nondistinctive ones. The reduction in memory errors generalises to different types of emotional distinctiveness: emotional lures from neutral words, neutral lures from emotional words, and lures that have opposite valence from the studied ones. However, emotionally distinctive lures were still prone to memory errors. Repeated exposure to orthographically related items resulted in higher recognition error rates than lures without such exposure. Implications for everyday memory are discussed.     

Memory for emotional stories in high and low depressed children

Cognitive theories of depression emphasise a vicious circle linking depressed mood and biased recall towards negative information. In line with this, depressed adults show selectively enhanced recall for negative information. This recall bias is held to be mediated by increased accessibility of negative self-referent schemas formed as a result of adverse early experiences. Given this, surprisingly few studies have examined depression-related recall biases from a developmental perspective. Clinically depressed children have been found to show enhanced recall of negative adjectives, particularly when self-referent, but to date there is no evidence for similar recall biases in non-clinically depressed groups. The current study addressed this by investigating high and low non-clinically depressed children's (aged 5-11 years) recall of emotional stories. High depressed children showed enhanced recall of negative stories, relative to positive stories, compared to the low depressed group. This did not vary with age group. We conclude that, when child-oriented materials are used, depression-related biases in recall towards negative information are observable even in a non-clinical sample of children from 5 years of age.     

Memory, emotional processing, and anxiety: A critique

This article explores evidence for an emotional processing view of the role of memory in anxiety disorders. It is argued that Lang (1977) and Foa and Kozak’s (1985) emotional processing hypothesis is adequate to account for mechanisms involved in most anxiety syndromes, but is less suitable for explaining persistent fear behavior in Panic Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. An alternative explanation for these disorders is provided.