Individual Differences in Arousal and Accessibility to Information in Memory

Abstract

The authors conducted 9 experiments to test the hypothesis (S. Schwartz, 1975) that arousal influences the accessibility of information stored in memory. They investigated the relationship between arousal levels (as indexed by personality types) and the type of stimuli or cues presented during study or test. They predicted that low-arousal individuals (stable extraverted individuals in Experiments 1-3 and 5-9 and high-impulsive individuals in Experiment 4) would be influenced by semantic stimuli, whereas high-arousal individuals (neurotic introverted individuals in Experiments 1-3 and 5-9 and low-impulsive individuals in Experiment 4) would be influenced by physical (i.e., graphic, phonetic, or both) stimuli. They tested the arousal-accessibility hypothesis by using a variety of tasks including verbal discrimination, false recognition, cued recall, and paired associates. With the exception of the finding that stable extraverted participants performed better than neurotic introverted participants on an incidental associative-matching task (Experiment 3), the results from the verbal discrimination studies (1-5) did not support the hypothesis. In Experiment 6, the authors tested the hypothesis by using a false-recognition task. False alarms varied as a function of phonetic and semantic stimuli, but personality types were not differentially sensitive to the manipulation. The same was true for the cued-recall studies (Experiments 7 and 8); personality types were not differentially sensitive to the semantic and phonetic stimuli. Experiment 9 (paired-associate learning) was a replication of Schwartz's study. The authors found some support for the Schwartz hypothesis: Extraverted participants were adversely affected by semantic similarity. Overall, the findings did not provide much support for the arousal-accessibility hypothesis.

Personality and social memory: High source and destination memory in extroverts

“…Analysis showed more correct responses and fewer errors on the recognition test in the extraverts than in the introverts. A similar conclusion was made by research using paired‐associates tasks (Berlyne & Carey, 1968; Eysenck, 1975; Howarth, 1969; Howarth & Eysenck, 1968; Libkuman, Griffith, Wines, Dickel & Doty, 1998; Purohit, 1966). For instance, Berlyne and Carey (1968) exposed subjects to word‐pairs.…”

“…Our findings extend previous research on the tendency of extraverts to demonstrate high item‐memory (Jensen, 1962; McLaughlin & Kary, 1972; Schwartz, 1975), high associative‐memory (Berlyne & Carey, 1968; Eysenck, 1975; Howarth, 1969; Howarth & Eysenck, 1968; Libkuman et al ., 1998; Purohit, 1966), high working memory (Lieberman, 2000), and high prospective memory (Heffernan & Ling, 2001). Although the existing literature has emphasized the relationship between extraversion and memory, little effort has been made to evaluate memory for social stimuli in extraverts.…”

“…To summarize, while previous research has emphasized high memory in extraverts (Berlyne & Carey, 1968; Eysenck, 1975; Howarth, 1969; Howarth & Eysenck, 1968; Libkuman et al ., 1998; Purohit, 1966), it has not assessed the relationship between extraversion and the ability to remember who told us a piece of information (i.e., source memory) or the ability to remember to whom we told an information (i.e., destination memory). Because source memory and destination memory are closely linked with social processing (El Haj & Miller, 2017), and because extraverts are by nature directed toward social processing (Eysenck, 1982), we expected significant positive correlations between extraversion and performances on source and destination memory, that is,, the more participants describe themselves as extraverts, the higher their source and destination memory.…”