Impact of individual differences upon emotion-induced memory trade-offs

Abstract

After seeing a scene containing an emotional component (e.g., a snake in a forest) people often demonstrate a "trade-off" in memory, where memory for the emotional component (e.g., the snake) is good, but memory for the nonemotional elements (e.g., the forest) is poor. The result is an incomplete memory retaining central emotional information at the expense of neutral background information. Though almost everyone demonstrates the trade-off, there may be individual differences in the magnitude of the effect. We investigated whether differences in the strength of the trade-off would correlate with anxiety levels, working memory capacity, and executive functioning abilities. Sixty-four participants studied scenes comprised of a negative or neutral item placed on a neutral background, and memory was later tested for items and backgrounds separately. The magnitude of the trade-off correlated positively with anxiety and negatively with visuospatial working memory and executive function. These results suggest that greater anxiety, poor visuospatial working memory, and poor executive function may inhibit formation of complete mental representations of these complex emotional scenes. Keywords individual differences; emotion; memory; trade-off Although memories often are retained with a great degree of clarity, it is well known that humans do not create truly photographic quality memories. Most of the time, we are unable to retain in memory all features of an event with vividness and accuracy. Rather, some features of an experience are recalled with vividness and accuracy, while others are less clear and may become distorted over time.These effects have been noted many times in laboratory studies of memory for complex visual scenes. Although participants usually can remember at least some aspects of the scene, theyCorrespondence concerning this article should be sent to: Jill D. Waring, Department of Psychology, Boston College, McGuinn Hall 301, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 waringj@bc.edu Phone: 617-552-0659 Fax: 617-552-0532. 1 ANOVAs revealed no effect of presentation rate on the magnitude of the trade-off for specific recognition (F(1,39)=1.56, p=.22) or general recognition scores (F(1,39)< .1). ANOVAs also revealed no main effect of delay on the magnitude of the trade-off in general recognition scores (F(1,63)=2.08, p=.16) and only a trend for an effect of delay upon specific recognition scores (F(1,63) =3.62, p=.06). The strength of the correlations between the general and specific recognition trade-offs and cognitive scores also did not differ as a function of presentation rate or delay; using Fisher's r-to-z transformed correlation coefficients revealed no differences in the strength of correlations between cognitive measures and trade-off magnitude that survived the Bonferroni correction (general, z(r) <2.27, p>.02; specific, z(r) <2.74, p>.006). often cannot remember all the scene's details (Burke, Heuer, & Reisberg, 1992;Kensinger, Garoff-Eaton, & Schacter, 2007a). Interestingly, several factors impact the ...

The effects of negative emotion on encoding-related neural activity predicting item and source recognition

“…For instance, results from the field of eyewitness memory research show that the central aspects of an emotional scene tend to be better remembered, whereas memory for more peripheral aspects of the scene are poorer compared to neutral scenes (Christianson, 1992;Easterbrook, 1959). However, it has to be noted that recent research indicates that the effects of emotion on item-context tradeoffs are complex and can vary according to multiple factors (Waring et al, 2010).…”

Vocal emotions influence verbal memory: Neural correlates and interindividual differences

“…Moreover, quite a number of studies using emotional faces, pictures, or sentences have found no modulation of to-be-remembered neutral content (Johansson et al, 2004;Maratos, Dolan, Morris, Henson & Rugg 2001;Righi et al, 2012;Schmidt, 2012;Wiswede, Rüsseler, Hasselbach & Münte 2006). Additionally, there is evidence that enhanced memory for emotional elements in a visual scene may come at the cost of impoverished memory for neutral elements (Kensinger, Piguet, Krendl & Corkin 2005;Waring, Payne, Schacter & Kensinger 2010).…”

The emotion-induced memory trade-off: More than an effect of overt attention?

“…1). The stimulus set included items and backgrounds used in prior studies (Kensinger, Gutchess, & Schacter, 2007a, b;Waring & Kensinger, 2009;Waring, Payne, Schacter, & Kensinger, 2010). Care was taken to make sure that the positive, negative, and neutral items were of comparable size and were balanced by approximate scene location.…”