Abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated that details of verbal material are retained in memory. Further, converging evidence points to a memory-enhancing effect of emotion such that memory for emotional events is stronger than memory for neutral events. Building upon this work, it appears likely that verbatim sentence forms will be remembered better when tinged with emotional nuance. Most previous studies have focused on single words. The current study examines the role of emotional nuance in the verbatim retention of longer sentences in written material. In this study, participants silently read transcriptions of spontaneous narratives, half of which had been delivered within a context of emotional expression and the other half with neutral expression. Transcripts were taken from selected narratives that received the highest, most extreme ratings, neutral or emotional. Participants identified written excerpts in a yes/no recognition test. Results revealed that participants’ verbatim memory was significantly greater for excerpts from emotionally nuanced narratives than from neutral narratives. It is concluded that the narratives, pre-rated as emotional or neutral, drove this effect of emotion on verbatim retention. These findings expand a growing body of evidence for a role of emotion in memory, and lend support to episodic theories of language and the constructionist account.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Emotion Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in PsychologyReceived: 23 January 2020 Accepted: 19 May 2021 Published: 14 June 2021Citation: Kim Y, Sidtis DVL and Sidtis JJ (2021) Emotional Nuance EnhancesVerbatim Retention of Written Materials
The results revealed that listeners successfully distinguished between the text in verbatim form and in a paraphrased form, which lends support to the existence of verbatim memory
Unlike prior studies that examined verbatim memory for spoken language (Keenan et al, 1977; Gurevich et al, 2010), this study focused on the written modality, the extent to which verbatim memory may be influenced by emotional nuance conveyed in written language
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Emotion Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in PsychologyReceived: 23 January 2020 Accepted: 19 May 2021 Published: 14 June 2021Verbatim Retention of Written Materials. Originating from a classic study by Sachs (1967), the propositional theory in psychology holds that the verbatim forms of sentences (exact wording) are no longer retained after comprehension takes place, with only the gist (semantic content) of verbal materials being remembered (Bartlett, 1932; Anderson and Bower, 1973). This idea is consistent with the tenets of Chomsky (1957, 1965, 1981) generative grammar, which presupposes that language users infer a generalization from individual items. Consistent with the episodic account of speech perception (Hintzman, 1986; Palmeri et al, 1993; Nygaard et al, 1994; Goldinger, 1996), the constructionist approach (Goldberg, 2006) in linguistics proposes that our knowledge of language includes both item-specific information
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