Remembrance of Emotional Speech: Improvement and Impairment of Incidental Verbal Memory by Emotional Voice

Abstract

Drawing on a growing body of literature on the attention-capturing potential of emotional stimuli, two studies examined some mnemonic consequences of an exposure to emotionally spoken communications. Subjects (total N=108) performed a memory span task, in which they were to commit to memory either 2 or 4 2-digit numbers for 20 s. During this interval, a spoken sentence varying in emotional intonation was presented as a distraction stimulus. When the load of the memory span task was heavy, emotional intonations, especially negative ones,improvedincidental verbal memory of the sentence. By contrast, when the load was light, both emotionally positive and negative intonationsimpairedthe incidental verbal memory. These findings were interpreted to support the hypothesis that when a message is delivered in an emotional voice, it captures attention and, further, that the attention thus allocated to the message is divided between the voice and the verbal tone. Implications for the operation of selective attention in daily social settings were discussed.