Investigating the role of emotion during the search process in free recall

Typically, research has shown that emotional words are remembered better than neutral words; however, most studies have reported only the mean proportion of correctly recalled words. The present study looked at various dependent measures used by search models to determine whether emotion can influence the search process as well. The results from Experiment 2 showed that when emotionality was made salient, participants were able to utilize emotional associations, in addition to temporal associations, to cue retrieval of additional emotional words during subsequent sampling but relied mainly on temporal context when the emotional information was not made salient (Experiment 1). Additionally, both experiments showed that emotional words were more likely to be output earlier in the recall sequence, which would suggest that emotion also serves to boost relative strength during initial sampling. Overall, the results suggest that emotion contributes to enhanced memory dynamically by influencing the probability of sampling an item during the search process—specifically, by boosting relative strength and strengthening interitem associations.