Taboo words: The effect of emotion on memory for peripheral information

In three experiments, we examined memory for peripheral information that occurred in the same context as emotion-inducing information. In the first two experiments, participants studied either a sentence (Experiment 1) or a pair of words (Experiments 2A—2C) containing a neutral peripheral word, as well as a neutral, negative-valence, or taboo word, to induce an emotional response. At retrieval, the participants were asked to recall the neutral peripheral word from a sentence fragment or emotion-inducing word cue. In Experiment 3, we presented word pairs at encoding and tested memory with associative recognition. In all three experiments, memory for peripheral words was enhanced when it was encoded in the presence of emotionally arousing taboo words but not when it was encoded in the presence of words that were only negative in valence. These data are consistent with priority-binding theory (MacKay et al., 2004) and inconsistent with the attention-narrowing hypothesis (Easterbrook, 1959), as well as with object-based binding theory (Mather, 2007).