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Recent experiments have implied that emotional arousal causes a narrowing of attention and, therefore, impoverished memory encoding. In contrast, other studies have found that emotional arousal enhances memory for all aspects of an event. We report two experiments investigating whether these differing results are due to the different retention intervals employed in past studies or to their different categorization schemes for the to-be-remembered material. Our results indicate a small role for retention interval in moderating emotion's effects on memory. However, emotion had markedly different impacts on different types of material: Emotion improved memory for gist and basic-level visual information and for plot-irrelevant details associated, both temporally and spatially, with the event's center. In contrast, emotion undermined memory for details not associated with the event's center. The mechanisms for emotion's effects are discussed.The emotional events in one's life tend to be remembered with great clarity and detail (e.g., Bohannon, 1988; Brown & Kulik, 1977;Pillemer, 1984;Reisberg, Heuer, McLean, & O'Shaughnessy, 1988;Rubin & Kozin, 1984;White, 1989). But how accurate are these memories? There are a number of cases in which conspicuous errors have been documented in the recall of emotional events, despite the great vividness and high confidence attached to these memories (Christianson, 1989; Linton, 1975, pp. 386-387; McCloskey, Wible, & Cohen, 1988;Neisser, 1982;Neisser & Harsch, 1990;Wagenaar & Groeneweg, 1990). Apparently, neither emotionality nor vividness provides any guarantee of memory accuracy.In fact, there is reason to believe that emotional events may be remembered less completely than neutral events.According to the Easterbrook hypothesis, physiological arousal leads to a "narrowing" of attention-that is, a reduction in the range of cues to which an organism is sensitive (e.g., Bruner, Matter, & Papanek, 1955;Easterbrook, 1959;Eysenck, 1982;Mandler, 1975). Since arousal generally accompanies emotion, emotion should also lead to this narrowing of attention. This should in tum lead to impoverished memories, since the "center" of the event might be well remembered, but little else will be. If, therefore, many details are subsequently recalled, these are likely to be after-the-fact reconstructions and, thus, open to error. A number of studies have examined these claims, but with conflicting results. Much of the research has examined memory for specific details about emotional events (color of clothing, details of background, etc.). It is This research was supported by funds from the Pew Charitable Trust and from Reed College. We thank Ben Harper for his help in completing Experiment I, and Audrey Wessler for her help in completing Experiment 2. Requests for reprints should be sent to the third author at Psychology Department, Reed College, Portland OR 97202 (e-mail: reisberg@reed.edu).presumably just these details that might be excluded by the hypothesized narrowing of attention. These specific ...

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Many studies have indicated that emotional arousal improves memory for the center, or gist, of an event but undermines memory for the event's periphery. However, all of these studies have elicited emotion by showing participants some salient visual stimulus intended to arouse them (e.g., the sight of a wound). This stimulus may have served as an attention magnet, and this, not the arousal, may have been the cause of the observed narrowing of memory. In this article, we examine how participants remember events that involve thematically induced arousal, arousal produced by empathy, rather than by a visual emotional stimulus. The data show that emotionality improves memory for all aspects of these events, with no memory narrowing.

Vivid or detailed memories are reliably associated with the recollection of emotional events. However, the mechanism through which emotionality has this impact remains unspecified. Our results indicate that the character of the emotion does not influence memory vividness; instead, vividness seems to be dependent only on the quantity of emotion that accompanies the event.We consider the implications of this for accounts of emotion 's effects.