Abstract
The Autobiographical Emotional Memory Task (AEMT), which involves recalling and writing about intense emotional experiences, is a widely used method to experimentally induce emotions. The validity of this method depends upon the extent to which it can induce specific desired emotions (intended emotions), while not inducing any other (incidental) emotions at different levels across one (or more) conditions. A review of recent studies that used this method indicated that most studies exclusively monitor post-writing ratings of the intended emotions, without assessing the possibility that the method may have differentially induced other incidental emotions as well. We investigated the extent of this issue by collecting both pre- and post-writing ratings of incidental emotions in addition to the intended emotions. Using methods largely adapted from previous studies, participants were assigned to write about a profound experience of anger or fear (Experiment 1) or happiness or sadness (Experiment 2). In line with previous research, results indicated that intended emotions (anger and fear) were successfully induced in the respective conditions in Experiment 1. However, disgust and sadness were also induced while writing about an angry experience compared to a fearful experience. Similarly, although happiness and sadness were induced in the appropriate conditions, Experiment 2 indicated that writing about a sad experience also induced disgust, fear, and anger, compared to writing about a happy experience. Possible resolutions to avoid the limitations of the AEMT to induce specific discrete emotions are discussed.
Highlights
Induction Quite different from folklore psychology, which maintains that emotions and cognition are separate systems in the brain, scientific research has convincingly shown that emotions interact with and impact a large range of cognitive processes including creativity, decision-making, memory, problem solving, and learning, among others [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
We expected that the intended emotions would be significantly higher in their respective conditions
Two incidental emotions increased significantly after writing about an angry experience and occurred at significantly higher levels compared to the fearful condition
Summary
Induction Quite different from folklore psychology, which maintains that emotions and cognition are separate systems in the brain (i.e., left vs. right brain), scientific research has convincingly shown that emotions interact with and impact a large range of cognitive processes including creativity, decision-making, memory, problem solving, and learning, among others [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. The common paradigm to investigate the causal effect of an emotion or mood on some dependent variable (e.g., memory, strategy selection, performance) is to experimentally induce an emotion or mood state and compare the dependent variable of interest in the experimental condition to alternate controls (e.g., another emotion or a neutral condition). One theory argued that attempts to induce specific emotions are unreliable and may even be the cause of inconsistent findings in the literature [19,21] According to this theory, multiple emotions, or more general mood states, are more likely to arise as a result of an emotion induction compared to a specific emotion [21]. To date, this type of theoretical assertion has not been a major deterrent for the continued use of emotion induction techniques to make claims about effects of a specific emotion
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