Remembering emotional events

Abstract

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 ...

Recall, recognition, and confidence patterns in eyewitness testimony

“…The false recognition sentences, unlike in other studies where distracters are easier to distinguish (e.g. Burke et al, 1992;Heuer and Reisberg, 1990), included contents that ®t in well with the event and, as in studies analysing the misinformation e ect (e.g. Loftus and Ho man, 1989;Weingardt et al, 1994), subjects could have been misled by suggested information.…”

“…First, in spite of great e orts made for subjects to be incidental observers of the emotional material (e.g. Burke et al, 1992;Christianson, 1984;Heuer and Reisberg, 1990), there was nothing which contrasted in a direct and simple fashion the di erences between incidental and intentional processing. Second, by using a ®lm instead of static materials, such as slides, the di erence between the type of information (central and peripheral) and evaluated contents (actions and details) was systematically distinguished, thereby analysing the e ect of both variables in two successive recall tests, recognition and response con®dence.…”

“…Christianson, 1992;Christianson et al, 1996) embraces a perceptual-spatial de®nition, regarding aspects linked to the emotional source as central (gist and its central details), and contents preceding or following the emotional event, or those irrelevant or spatially non-central to the emotional core, as peripheral. However, Burke, Heuer and Reisberg (1992;Reisberg, 1990, 1992) support a conceptual de®nition, viewing aspects which cannot be excluded or changed without altering the argument of the event as central, and contents irrelevant to the argument as peripheral. An additional problem involves determining which contents should be evaluated so that performance in both types of information (central versus peripheral) is equal, since gist, facts and relevant details are not comparable to more particular details.…”

“…Therefore, the di erence between central and peripheral information set forth in the attentional narrowing hypothesis (Easterbrook, 1959) may largely explain the divergences detected. Taking this variable into account, ®eld studies (Christianson and HuÈ binette, 1993), traumatic autobiographical experiences (Christianson and Loftus, 1990;Wessel and Merckelbach, 1994), laboratory work simulating events by means of slides (Burke et al, 1992;Christianson, 1984;Christianson et al, 1996;Loftus, 1987, 1991;Heuer and Reisberg, 1990), ®lms (Kebeck and Lohaus, 1986) or aversive situations (Wessell and Merckelbach, 1997) demonstrate that central contents of emotional events are recalled with precision to the detriment of other more peripheral contents.…”

“…Burke et al, 1992;Christianson, 1984;Heuer and Reisberg, 1990). In this study one intentional and one incidental learning condition were prepared for the purposes of checking to see if the type of learning a ects general performance or the memory pattern for the di erent contents of the event.…”