Reduced association-memory for negative information: impact of confidence and interactive imagery during study

Abstract

Although item-memory for emotional information is enhanced, memory for associations between items is impaired for negative, emotionally arousing compared to neutral information. We tested two possible mechanisms underlying this impairment, using picture pairs: 1) higher confidence in one’s own ability to memorise negative information may cause participants to under-study negative pairs; 2) better interactive imagery for neutral pairs could facilitate association-memory for neutral more than for negative pairs. Tested with associative recognition, we replicated the impairment of association-memory for negative relative to neutral pairs. We also replicated the result that confidence in future memory (judgments of learning) was higher for negative than neutral pairs. Inflated confidence could not explain the impairment of associative recognition memory: Judgements of learning were positively correlated with association-memory success for both, negative and neutral pairs. However, neutral pairs were rated higher in their conduciveness to interactive imagery than negative pairs, and this difference in interactive imagery showed a robust relationship to the association-memory difference. Thus, association-memory reductions for negative information are not due to differences in encoding effort. Instead, interactive imagery may be less effective for encoding of negative than neutral pairs.

Affect enhances object-background associations: evidence from behaviour and mathematical modelling

“…The fact that emotion enhanced association-memory stands in contrast to prior studies, using paired-associates tasks, which have found that when a negative item is present it leads to impairments in cued recall (e.g., Caplan et al, 2019;Madan et al, 2012Madan et al, , 2017Mao et al, 2017;Rimmele et al, 2011;Touryan et al, 2007). The current study instead found that negative items lead to enhanced memory for the associated target.…”

Exploring the generalisation of affect across related experiences: A study of affective bleed and memory precision

“…Although it is well-established that emotional stimuli are better remembered than neutral stimuli, there is also evidence that negative emotion can impair intentional association learning when the to-be-associated stimuli are unrelated (Touryan et al, 2007;Zimmerman & Kelley, 2010;Madan et al, , 2017aBisby & Burgess, 2014;Bisby et al, 2018;Caplan et al, 2019;Palombo et al, 2021). Notably, this occurs even when items are presented relatively slowly and sequentially and when there is sufficient evidence of item-memory but impaired association-memory (Madan et al 2017).…”