Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kensinger, Elizabeth A.
• Garoff-Eaton, Rachel J.
• Schacter, Daniel L.

Titel

Effects of emotion on memory specificity: Memory trade-offs elicited by negative visually arousing stimuli

Ist Teil von

• Journal of memory and language, 2007-05, Vol.56 (4), p.575-591

Ort / Verlag

San Diego, CA: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2007

Quelle

ERIC

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Two different types of trade-offs have been discussed with regard to memory for emotional information: A trade-off in the ability to remember the gist versus the visual detail of emotional information, and a trade-off in the ability to remember the central emotional elements of an event versus the nonemotional (peripheral) elements of that same event. The present study examined whether these two trade-offs interact with one another when participants study scenes that elicit an emotional response due to the inclusion of a negative visually arousing object. Participants studied scenes composed of a negative or a neutral object placed on a background. Their memory was then tested for the “gist” and visual detail of the objects and the backgrounds. The results revealed that there is a pervasive memory trade-off for central emotional versus peripheral nonemotional elements of scenes. With some encoding tasks, a trade-off for gist versus visual detail also resulted, but this trade-off occurred only when memory for the nonemotional background of a scene was assessed. There was no gist/detail trade-off for the emotional objects in a scene.