ERP indices of emotionality and semantic cohesiveness during recognition judgments

Abstract

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the impact of emotionality on false recognition. In Experiment 1, participants discriminated previously studied words from neutral and negatively valenced emotional foils. Emotional words elicited a more positive ERP than did neutral words and emotional foils were falsely recognized more often than neutral foils. In Experiment 2, the hypothesis that emotionality-based false recognition is due to the semantic cohesiveness of emotional words was tested by including a highly associated but emotionally neutral category (animals). It was emotional and not animal foils that elicited greater positivity in the ERP and increased false positive response. These data provide little support for semantic cohesiveness as the basis for false recognition effects, but are consistent with the view that the salience of emotional words can be falsely attributed to familiarity in the context of a recognition task.

Impaired Memory Retrieval after Psychosocial Stress in Healthy Young Men

“…They had to sort the words into groups with high inter-item associations (Miller, 1969). Emotionally arousing words often show a higher semantic cohesion than neutral words, and it is argued that some emotional effects are actually based on semantic cohesion rather than on emotional arousal (Maratos et al, 2000) [but see McNeely et al (2004) for a divergent opinion]. In the current study, the two lists and the three categories did not differ with regard to semantic cohesion.…”

Intact emotion-induced recognition bias in neuropsychological patients with executive control deficits

“…There are two theories of this sort. The first one relates the EIRB to the effects of semantic cohesion in proposing that emotionally negative words may be semantically more interrelated than emotionally neutral words (Maratos et al, 2000; but see Johansson et al, 2004;McNeely et al, 2004), as confirmed by our own post hoc study. Due to stronger priming effects and other mechanisms that are not yet fully understood, this enhanced interrelatedness drives up hit and false alarm rates, resulting in a more liberal response bias, similar to what has been observed in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Miller & Wolford, 1999;Roediger & McDermott, 1995).…”

“…In the present study, there was no evidence that the EIRB correlated with accurate memory, despite the wide variations in the performance scores from .10 (chance performance) to 1 (perfect memory). Other, more direct tests of the semantic cohesion account have not found supporting evidence either (Johansson et al, 2004;McNeely et al, 2004), although inconsistencies remain (Windmann & Chmielewski, 2006).…”

“…Studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) have suggested that this emotion-induced recognition bias (EIRB) is correlated with an ERP effect occurring around 400 msec poststimulus, a time frame sensitive to automatic memory effects (Johansson et al, 2004;McNeely et al, 2004;Windmann & Kutas, 2001). The fact that these effects precede consciously controlled memory retrieval has led to the hypothesis that affect processing might automatically interfere with criterion setting and executive control functions activated early during memory retrieval (Windmann, Urbach, & Kutas, 2002) and other cognitive tasks.…”

“…Laboratory studies suggest that relaxing the decision criterion or response bias may be an additional mechanism by which the cognitive system can effectively increase its chances that emotional events are not forgotten or overlooked (Johansson, Mecklinger, & Treese, 2004;Maratos, Allan, & Rugg, 2000;McNeely, Dywan, & Segalowitz, 2004;Windmann, Daum, & Güntürkün, 2002;Windmann & Krüger, 1998;Windmann & Kutas, 2001). Most of these studies have used recognition memory tasks with word stimuli to investigate not only correct recognition but also false recognition of emotionally negative rather than neutral events.…”