Advantage for Emotional Words in Immediate and Delayed Memory Tasks: Could it be Explained in Terms of Processing Capacity?

Ferré, Pilar

doi:10.1017/s1138741600005850

Cited by 13 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Tse and Altarriba (2009) observed higher recall performance for negative word lists relative to neutral word lists, while observing no advantage for positive word lists relative to neutral word lists. Ferré (2002) observed an effect of emotional valence on immediate serial performance within a mixed list design, positive and negative words being recalled more accurately than neutral words.…”

Section: The Impact Of Emotional Semantic Content On Stmmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Only a few studies previously explored the impact of emotion on word list recall in a STM context, showing no effect of emotion on pure list recall (Kensinger & Corkin, 2003), or showing an effect of positive valence on pure list recall but without controlling for semantic relatedness (Monnier & Syssau, 2006), or showing an effect of emotion on mixed list recall (Ferré, 2002). Contrary to the studies by Kensinger and Corkin, which used only negative words, and by Monnier and Syssau, which used only positive words, the present study used both positive and negative words, and showed indeed the most reliable effect of emotional content on STM recall performance for positive words.…”

Section: The Emotional Valence Effect As New Evidence For Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Verbal short-term memory reflects the organization of long-term memory: Further evidence from short-term memory for emotional words

Majerus

D’Argembeau

2011

Journal of Memory and Language

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Many studies suggest that long-term lexical-semantic knowledge is an important determinant of verbal short-term memory (STM) performance. This study explored the impact of emotional valence on word immediate serial recall as a further lexico-semantic long-term memory (LTM) effect on STM. This effect is particularly interesting for the study of STM-LTM interactions since emotional words not only activate specific lexico-semantic LTM features but also capture attentional resources, and hence allow for the study of both LTM and attentional factors on STM tasks. In Experiments 1 and 2, we observed a robust effect of emotional valence on pure list recall in both young and elderly adults, with higher recall performance for emotional lists as opposed to neutral lists, as predicted by increased LTM support for emotional words. In Experiments 3 and 4 however, using mixed lists, it was the lists containing a minority of emotional words which led to higher recall performance over lists containing a majority of emotional words. This was predicted by a weak version of the attentional capture account. These data add new evidence to the theoretical position that LTM knowledge is a critical determinant of STM performance, with further, list-type dependent intervention of attentional factors. words 3There is a substantial body of research showing that verbal short-term memory (STM) is not an autonomous cognitive function, but instead recruits linguistic knowledge bases to a very large extent. The present study explored a further potential long-term memory (LTM) effect on STM performance, the impact of emotional-semantic knowledge associated with emotional words. The impact of verbal LTM on STMMany studies show that the linguistic properties of the words, such as lexical status, lexical frequency, phonotactic frequency, word imageability, have a direct impact on their recall probability during a STM task (Gathercole, Frankish, Pickering & Peaker, 1999;Hulme et al., 1997;Majerus & Van der Linden, 2003;Roodenrys, Hulme, Alban, & Ellis, 1994;Walker & Hulme, 1999). The most prototypical effect is the lexicality effect, characterized by higher recall performance for lists composed of familiar words, as opposed to lists composed of nonwords (e.g., Gathercole et al., 1999;Hulme, Maughan & Brown, 1991).These effects have been shown to be independent of articulatory rehearsal factors (e.g., Gathercole et al., 1999;Hulme et al., 1991). The existence of these psycholinguistic effects has been interpreted as reflecting the influence of phonological, lexical and semantic language representations stored in LTM on verbal STM (Hulme et al., 1991). On the one hand, this LTM support is supposed to function at the level of retrieval, when the decayed STM traced is reconstructed via corresponding LTM representations: the more available and familiar these representations are, the more efficient these reconstruction processes will be (the so-called redintegration process) (Hulme et al., 1997;Gathercole et al., 1999;Schweickert, 1993). Other th...

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Section: The Impact Of Emotional Semantic Content On Stmmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: The Emotional Valence Effect As New Evidence For Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal short-term memory reflects the organization of long-term memory: Further evidence from short-term memory for emotional words

Majerus

D’Argembeau

2011

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…These early studies found that im mediate testing led to fewer forgotten associations when arousal was low compared to when arousal was high, whereas longer retention intervals reversed this effect. However, later studies did not find any effects of emotion on immediate memory tests (Kebeck & Lohaus, 1986;Sharot & Yonelinas, 2008;Talmi & McGarry, 2012) or found superior memory for emotional stimuli (see Ferre, 2002, for a review). This pattern of findings suggests that while emotional stimuli are better remembered over longer reten tion intervals, their effect on immediate memory is much less consistent.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Involuntary memories of emotional scenes: The effects of cue discriminability and emotion over time.

Staugaard¹,

Berntsen²

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Involuntary episodic memories come to mind spontaneously--that is, with no preceding retrieval attempts. Such memories are frequent in daily life, in which they are predominantly positive and often triggered by situational features matching distinctive parts of the memory. However, individuals suffering from psychological disorders, such as posttraumatic stress disorder, have stressful, repetitive, and unwanted involuntary memories about negative events in their past. These unwanted recollections are disturbing and debilitating. Although such intrusive involuntary memories are observed across a range of clinical disorders, there is no broadly agreed upon explanation of their underlying mechanisms and no successful experimental simulations of their retrieval. In a series of experiments, we experimentally manipulated the activation of involuntary episodic memories for emotional and neutral scenes and predicted their activation on the basis of manipulations carried out at encoding and retrieval. Our findings suggest that the interplay between cue discriminability at the time of retrieval and emotional arousal at the time of encoding are crucial for explaining intrusive memories following negative events. While cue distinctiveness is important directly following encoding of the scenes, emotional intensity influences retrieval after delays of 24 hr and 1 week. Voluntary remembering follows the same pattern as involuntary remembering. Our results suggest an explanatory model of intrusive involuntary memory for emotional events in clinical disorders.

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“…It is widely acknowledged that emotion words behave more distinctively than concrete and abstract words (e.g., Altarriba et al 1999;Bauer et al 2009;El-Dakhs and Altarriba 2018). It has also been recurrently reported that emotion words exhibit a processing advantage over neutral words across several cognitive tasks (Ferré 2002;Kazanas and Altarriba 2015a;Kousta et al 2009). These findings have triggered further studies (Kuperman et al 2014;Ponari et al 2015;Sereno et al 2015) that aimed to explore the potential modulating factors of this distinctiveness and processing advantage, such as word frequency, arousal and the participants' mood and L2 status.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Do Foreign Language Learners Process L2 Emotion Words in Silent Reading? An Eye-Tracking Study

2023

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The current study aimed to examine the processing of emotion words in L2 silent reading. We conducted two experiments in which Arab learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) read short English sentences in which target words were embedded. The participants’ eye movements were recorded and analyzed. The results of Experiment 1, which compared the processing of emotionally positive versus neutral words by 44 participants, did not reveal any significant effect for word type. The results only showed a few instances of significant interactions between word type and word frequency (i.e., positive words were read faster than neutral words only in the case of high-frequency words) and arousal (i.e., positive words were recognized faster than neutral words only when the target words were low in arousal). The results of Experiment 2, which compared the processing of emotionally negative versus neutral words by 43 participants, only established one effect of word type on the skipping rate which was also modulated by length (i.e., negative words were less likely to be skipped, particularly shorter ones). Moreover, arousal interacted with word type (i.e., only the negative words with low arousal were read faster than neutral words in two eye-movement measures).

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Advantage for Emotional Words in Immediate and Delayed Memory Tasks: Could it be Explained in Terms of Processing Capacity?

Cited by 13 publications

References 41 publications

Verbal short-term memory reflects the organization of long-term memory: Further evidence from short-term memory for emotional words

Verbal short-term memory reflects the organization of long-term memory: Further evidence from short-term memory for emotional words

Involuntary memories of emotional scenes: The effects of cue discriminability and emotion over time.

How Do Foreign Language Learners Process L2 Emotion Words in Silent Reading? An Eye-Tracking Study

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