Emotional valence of spoken words influences the spatial orienting of attention

The influence of the affective content of speech on the spatial orienting of auditory attention was examined by adapting the dot probe task. Two words, one of which was emotional in one quarter of the trials, were played simultaneously from a left- and a right-located loudspeaker, respectively, and followed (or not) by a lateralized beep to be detected (Experiments 1 and 2) or localized (Experiment 3). Taboo words induced attentional biases towards their spatial location in all experiments, as did negative words in Experiment 3, but not positive words. Thus, in audition, the identification of an emotional word automatically activates the information about its spatial origin. Moreover, for both word types, attentional biases were only observed when the emotional word was presented on the participant's right side, suggesting that the dominant left hemisphere processing of words constrains the occurrence of spatial congruency effects.     

Emotional valence and the functions

Differences between positive and negative autobiographical memories are often explained with reference to hypothesized evolutionary functions. Generally, it has been proposed that autobiographical memory serves directive, self-, and social functions. However, the relationship between emotional valence and the three functions has never been studied. In Study 1, participants generated memories that mapped onto each of the three functions. Directive memories were dominated by negative emotion, whereas self- and social memories were dominated by positive emotion. In Study 2, participants generated their most positive and most negative memories, as well as their most frequent involuntary and most vivid flashbulb memories, and the three functions were measured through rating-scale questions. The directive function had the lowest ratings across all memory classes, but, consistent with the results of Study 1, positive memories were rated higher on the self- and social functions, whereas negative memories were rated higher on the directive function.     

Context effects on remembering and knowing: the expectancy heuristic

Three experiments are reported examining the effect of context on remember-know judgments. In Experiments 1 and 2, medium-frequency words were intermixed with high-frequency or low-frequency words at study or at test, respectively. Remember responses were greater for medium-frequency targets when they were studied or tested among high-frequency, as compared with low-frequency, words. The authors proposed a decision-based mechanism called "the expectancy heuristic" to explain why remember responses were more likely when items were studied or tested in the context of words that were relatively less distinct. According to the expectancy heuristic, when items on a recognition test exceed an expected level of memorability they will be given a remember judgment but when they do not, but are still more familiar than new words, they will be given a know judgment. Experiment 3, which varied expectancies about the strength of tested targets, demonstrated the use of the expectancy heuristic, indicating that it operates by selectively influencing the remember criterion rather than by influencing recollection of studied items.     

The role of decision processes in remembering and knowing

Participants in recognition memory studies are now often asked to partition recognized items into ones that are accompanied by some recollective experience (those they remember) and ones that are not so accompanied (but which they know were previously encountered). Rather than detecting separate memory systems, such attempts to distinguish between remembering and knowing are better understood as a division of positive recognition responses into those that lie above a second decision criterion (remember) and those that do not (know). As such, the amount of memory associated with knowing is strongly dependent on the placement of the decision criteria. A meta-analysis of published data and a simple experiment tested predictions from the decision process analysis of remember/know responses.     

Interfering with remembering and knowing: effects of divided attention at retrieval

A Remember-Know paradigm was used to examine the cognitive resource requirements of recollection and familiarity memory processes at retrieval. Younger and older adults studied a list of words, and in a later auditory recognition test indicated whether each word was Remembered, Known, or New. Retrieval was performed under full or divided attention (DA) conditions, with either a digit task to numbers, or an animacy task to words, presented visually. Younger and older adults showed an increase in false Remember responses during both DA conditions, indicating a general effect of attention on illusory recollection. Both age groups also showed decreased accuracy in Know responses, but only during the word-based DA condition, indicating a material-specific effect on familiarity. Aging was associated with decreased accuracy in Remember, but not Know, responses, and with increased latency in distracting task responses under DA conditions. Results suggest that avoiding false recollective responses during retrieval requires attentional resources, whereas accurate familiarity responses require the reactivation of content-specific representations.     

Adults' memories of childhood: affect, knowing, and remembering

Adult questionnaire respondents reported, for each of a number of events, if they had experienced that event during childhood and, if so, if they remembered the experience or merely knew it had happened. Respondents also rated the emotion of each event and judged whether they would remember more about each reportedly experienced event if they spent more time trying to do so. Study 1 respondents were 96 undergraduates, whereas Study 2 tested 93 community members ranging widely in age. Respondents often reported no recollections of reportedly experienced events. Reportedly experienced events rated as emotional were more often recollected than those rated as neutral, and those rated as positive were more often recollected than those rated as negative. Predicted ability to remember more was related to current memory. Claims of remembering reportedly experienced events increased with age, but predicted ability to remember more about them declined with age.     

Adults' memories of childhood: Affect,knowing, and remembering

Adult questionnaire respondents reported, for each of a number of events, if they had experienced that event during childhood and, if so, if they remembered the experience or merely knew it had happened. Respondents also rated the emotion of each event and judged whether they would remember more about each reportedly experienced event if they spent more time trying to do so. Study 1 respondents were 96 undergraduates, whereas Study 2 tested 93 community members ranging widely in age. Respondents often reported no recollections of reportedly experienced events. Reportedly experienced events rated as emotional were more often recollected than those rated as neutral, and those rated as positive were more often recollected than those rated as negative. Predicted ability to remember more was related to current memory. Claims of remembering reportedly experienced events increased with age, but predicted ability to remember more about them declined with age.     

Sum-difference theory of remembering and knowing: a two-dimensional signal-detection model

In the remember-know paradigm for studying recognition memory, participants distinguish items whose presentations are episodically remembered from those that are merely familiar. A one-dimensional model postulates that remember responses are just high-confidence old judgments, but a meta-analysis of 373 experiments shows that the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves predicted by this model have the wrong slope. According to the new sum-difference Theory of remembering and knowing (STREAK), old items differ from new ones in both global and specific memory strength: The old-new judgment is based on a weighted sum of these dimensions, and the remember- know judgment is based on a weighted difference. STREAK accounts for the form of several novel kinds of ROC curves and for existing remember-know and item-recognition data.     

Emotional valence and reference disturbance in schizophrenia

The authors examined the impact of emotional valence on reference disturbance in patients with schizophrenia and identified factors that moderate individual differences in this relationship. Thirty-nine patients with schizophrenia were given an interview that elicited speech samples in response to 10 neutral and 6 negatively valenced emotional questions. Speech samples were analyzed using the Communication Disturbances Index (N. M. Docherty, M. DeRosa, & N. C. Andreasen, 1996). Participants were also assessed with the Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (S. Kay, 1991) and a single-trial Stroop task (Stroop, 1935). Group analyses indicated that negative questions elicited more unclear references than neutral questions. Both the severity of disorganization symptoms and selective attention deficits predicted increased reference errors in response to emotional questions.     

The influence of decision criteria upon remembering and knowing in recognition memory.

One may recognise an item as 'old' on basis of a recollective experience or by a feeling of familiarity without specific recollection. The former is called a 'remember' judgement; the latter a 'know' judgement. It has been claimed that remember and know responses reflect qualitatively distinct components of recognition memory, and not just derive from gradual differences in perceived trace strength or subjective certainty (i.e. remember judgments include memories of which one is more confident). Nonetheless, the present study examined the possibility that the distinction does relate to decision criteria placed upon a single familiarity axis (see Donaldson, 1996; Hirshman & Master, 1997). To this purpose, two groups of subjects were compared: one, which was instructed to be very conservative in their old-new judgements, while the other group was stimulated to be very lenient instead. Remember hit rates increased with more lenient criteria, whereas know hit rates did not, but false alarm rates did. While remember sensitivity was equal in the two groups, know sensitivity was lower with liberal criteria. Also it correlated with overall response bias. This lends support to the possibility that subjects not only apply an old-new decision criterion, but also set a remember-know criterion, which is affected in a similar way by liberal versus conservative instructions.     

Emotional valence modulates the preference for curved objects

Previous studies have shown that people prefer objects with curved contours over objects with sharp contours. However, those studies used stimuli that were mainly neutral in emotional valence. We tested here the interplay between visual features and general valence as positive or negative. After replicating curvature preferences for neutral objects, we used positive (cake, chocolate) and negative (snake, bomb) stimuli to examine if emotional valence-through response prioritisation-modulates the preference for curved objects. We found that people indeed preferred the curved versions of objects to the sharp versions of the same objects, but only if the objects were neutral or positive in emotional valence. There were no difference in liking for objects with negative emotional valence. This is evidence that the aesthetic response is adaptive, in this case prioritising valence over contour as demanded by the general semantic classification.     

Processing speed, executive function, and age differences in remembering and knowing.

A group of young (n = 52, M = 23.27 years) and old (n = 52, M = 68.62 years) adults studied two lists of semantically unrelated nouns. For one list a time of 2 s was allowed for encoding, and for the other, 5 s. A recognition test followed where participants classified their responses according to Gardiner's (1988) remember-know procedure. Age differences for remembering and knowing were minimal in the faster 2-s encoding condition. However, in the longer 5-s encoding condition, younger persons produced significantly more remember responses, and older adults a greater number of know responses. This dissociation suggests that in the longer encoding condition, younger adults utilized a greater level of elaborative rehearsal governed by executive processes, whereas older persons employed maintenance rehearsal involving short-term memory. Statistical control procedures, however, found that independent measures of processing speed accounted for age differences in remembering and knowing and that independent measures of executive control had little influence. The findings are discussed in the light of contrasting theoretical accounts of recollective experience in old age.     

Number of cues influences the cost of remembering to remember

A current focus in the prospective memory literature is the extent to which a prospective memory task (remembering to perform a future action) interferes with ongoing activities (defined in this study as lexical decision latencies). In the present study, participants had to detect one, two, three, four, five, or six prospective memory cues. Results showed no significant increase in lexical decision latencies with one or two targets; however, significant costs emerged with three or more targets. Furthermore, task interference showed a linear increase in task costs for word trial performance but not for nonword trial performance. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Emotional valence and arousal interact in attentional control

ABSTRACT— A recent study demonstrated that observers' ability to identify targets in a rapid visual sequence was enhanced when they simultaneously listened to happy music. In the study reported here, we examined how the emotion-attention relationship is influenced by changes in both mood valence (negative vs. positive) and arousal (low vs. high). We used a standard induction procedure to generate calm, happy, sad, and anxious moods in participants. Results for an attentional blink task showed no differences in first-target accuracy, but second-target accuracy was highest for participants with low arousal and negative affect (sad), lowest for those with strong arousal and negative affect (anxious), and intermediate for those with positive affect regardless of their arousal (calm, happy). We discuss implications of this valence-arousal interaction for the control of visual attention.     

Contextual information influences the feeling of knowing in episodic memory

The feeling of knowing (FOK) predicts the likelihood of eventually recognizing currently unrecalled items. Koriat (1993, 1995) showed that retrieval of partial target information influences FOK ratings. Building on Koriat’s view, the noncriterial-recollection hypothesis contends that contextual information influences FOKs (Brewer, Marsh, Clark-Foos, & Meeks, 2010). Our study assessed the validity of the noncriterial-recollection hypothesis by controlling the amount of potentially-retrievable contextual information presented to participants. We varied the amount of contextual information accompanying the name and image of imaginary animals. There were three information conditions: minimum (name and image), medium (name, image, and country), and maximum (name, image, country, diet and weight). Information condition did not affect recall accuracy. The minimum condition resulted in greater response output (recall and commission errors together). FOKs for unrecalled items were lower in the minimum condition than the other conditions. Consistent with the noncriterial-recollection hypothesis, FOKs were positively correlated with the retrieval of contextual information.     

Measuring the speed of the conscious components of recognition memory: remembering is faster than knowing

Three experiments investigated response times (RTs) for remember and know responses in recognition memory. RTs to remember responses were faster than RTs to know responses, regardless of whether the remember-know decision was preceded by an old/new decision (two-step procedure) or was made without a preceding old/new decision (one-step procedure). The finding of faster RTs for R responses was also found when remember-know decisions were made retrospectively. These findings are inconsistent with dual-process models of recognition memory, which predict that recollection is slower and more effortful than familiarity. Word frequency did not influence RTs, but remember responses were faster for words than for nonwords. We argue that the difference in RTs to remember and know responses reflects the time taken to make old/new decisions on the basis of the type of information activated at test.     

Emotional imagery: Strategies and correlates

Abstract

The purpose of the study was, first, to identify the strategies people use when imagining different emotions, and secondly, to test the hypothesis that persons high in role-playing (acting) ability are better able to become ideationally involved in emotional situations than are persons low in role-playing ability. Seventy-two female subjects, preselected on role-playing ability, were asked to imagine situations of fear, sadness, anger, and joy. Emotional involvement was assessed through self-reports and physiological responses. Situations of sadness were the easiest to imagine, followed by anger, joy, and fear. Although there were some commonalities in the strategies subjects used to become involved, there also were significant differences as a function of the particular emotion imagined. Finally, good role-players showed greater physiological reactivity during emotional imagery than did poor role-players.     

Emotional valence and physical space: limits of interaction

According to the body-specificity hypothesis, people associate positive things with the side of space that corresponds to their dominant hand and negative things with the side corresponding to their nondominant hand. Our aim was to find out whether this association holds also true for a response time study using linguistic stimuli, and whether such an association is activated automatically. Four experiments explored this association using positive and negative words. In Exp. 1, right-handers made a lexical judgment by pressing a left or right key. Attention was not explicitly drawn to the valence of the stimuli. No valence-by-side interaction emerged. In Exp. 2 and 3, right-handers and left-handers made a valence judgment by pressing a left or a right key. A valence-by-side interaction emerged: For positive words, responses were faster when participants responded with their dominant hand, whereas for negative words, responses were faster for the nondominant hand. Exp. 4 required a valence judgment without stating an explicit mapping of valence and side. No valence-by-side interaction emerged. The experiments provide evidence for an association between response side and valence, which, however, does not seem to be activated automatically but rather requires a task with an explicit response mapping to occur.