The effects of post-stimulus elaboration, background valence, and item salience on the emotion-induced memory trade-off

Abstract

ABSTRACT The effect of emotion on memory often leads to the trade-off: enhanced memory for emotional items comes at the cost of memory for background information. Although this effect is usually attributed to overt attention during encoding, Steinmetz and Kensinger (2013) proposed that such an effect might also be related to post-stimulus elaboration. Based on previous different viewpoints, we used the directed forgetting paradigm to further explore the effect of post-stimulus elaboration on the memory trade-off. In the meantime, we also tested the roles of background valence and item salience (high salient items were placed in the centre of backgrounds while low salient items were placed in the periphery of backgrounds) in modulating the memory trade-off. Our results showed that there was a memory trade-off when backgrounds were neutral, whereas this was no longer the case when backgrounds were negative. This indicated the memory trade-off might be affected by background valence. Meanwhile, we found post-stimulus elaboration contributed to selective memory enhancement for backgrounds, while item salience enhanced item memory performance in the memory trade-off. These findings suggest the emotion-induced memory trade-off may be a complex memory effect, which can be influenced by different factors to varying degrees.