Abstract
The formation of associations between items and their context has been proposed to rely on mechanisms distinct from those supporting memory for a single item. Although emotional experiences can profoundly affect memory, our understanding of how it interacts with different aspects of memory remains unclear. We performed three experiments to examine the effects of emotion on memory for items and their associations. By presenting neutral and negative items with background contexts, Experiment 1 demonstrated that item memory was facilitated by emotional affect, whereas memory for an associated context was reduced. In Experiment 2, arousal was manipulated independently of the memoranda, by a threat of shock, whereby encoding trials occurred under conditions of threat or safety. Memory for context was equally impaired by the presence of negative affect, whether induced by threat of shock or a negative item, relative to retrieval of the context of a neutral item in safety. In Experiment 3, participants were presented with neutral and negative items as paired associates, including all combinations of neutral and negative items. The results showed both above effects: compared to a neutral item, memory for the associate of a negative item (a second item here, context in Experiments 1 and 2) is impaired, whereas retrieval of the item itself is enhanced. Our findings suggest that negative affect impairs associative memory while recognition of a negative item is enhanced. They support dual-processing models in which negative affect or stress impairs hippocampal-dependent associative memory while the storage of negative sensory/perceptual representations is spared or even strengthened.
Highlights
Emotional experiences can have long-lasting effects on memory
Further examination of the interaction showed that recognition memory performance was greater for negative items compared to neutral items (t(17) 1⁄4 2.15, P 1⁄4 0.046, d 1⁄4 0.52)
The opposite pattern was observed for context memory with greater performance for retrieving contexts associated with neutral items compared to those associated with negative items (t(17) 1⁄4 4.00, P 1⁄4 0.001, d 1⁄4 0.95)
Summary
Real-life emotional events are generally thought to be remembered better than neutral ones (Brown and Kulik 1977; Neisser and Harsch 1992; Neisser et al 1996) This view has been confirmed in numerous experiments assessing memory for visually presented information, such as words, pictures, or film clips. Retrieval of source information associated with an item, such as an object presented in the periphery of the screen or the color of a border surrounding an item at study, is impaired when the item was emotionally arousing (Kensinger and Schacter 2006; Touryan et al 2007; Mather and Knight 2008; Pierce and Kensinger 2011; Rimmele et al 2011). These findings suggest that emotion can enhance item memory, while impairing associations between items
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