The quantity, not the quality, of affect predicts memory vividness

Reisberg, Daniel; Heuer, Friderike; McLean, John M.; O'Shaughnessy, Mark P.

doi:10.3758/bf03334873

Cited by 84 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…This conclusion was supported by evidence that (a) larger proportions of R responses were given to more highly arousing, negative, and to a lesser extent, positive stimuli and (b) estimates of the contribution to performance of a consciously mediated recollection process (Yonelinas et al, 1998) produced the same pattern of results. These data provide initial support for the hypothesis that affect leads to increases in the distinctiveness with which stimuli are encoded and reexperienced in memory later .on and suggests that previous failures (Bradley et al, 1992;Reisberg et al, 1988) to detect an impact of valence on memory may have been due to the use of memory measures that were not sensitive to differences in the experience or process of recognizing past events.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

“…Third, some previous failures to find effects of valence on memory have used recall rather than recognition tests (e.g., Reisberg et al, 1988;Thomas & Diener, 1990). Recall tests either may not present retrieval cues strong enough to elicit differences in phenomenal experience between negative and positive items or they may not use measures (e.g., rating vividness) that are sensitive enough to detect differences in this experience.…”

Section: Implications For Other Findings and Memory Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Are affective events richly recollected or simply familiar? The experience and process of recognizing feelings past.

Ochsner¹

2000

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

602

114

533

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The author used the remember/know paradigm and the dual process recognition model of A. P. Yonelinas, N. E. A. Kroll, I. Dobbins, M. Lazzara, and R. T. Knight (1998) to study the states of awareness accompanying recognition of affective images and the processes of recollection and familiarity that may underlie them. Results from all experiments showed that (a) negative stimuli tended to be remembered, whereas positive stimuli tended to be known; (b) recollection, but not familiarity, was boosted for negative or highly arousing and, to a lesser extent, positive stimuli; and (c) across experiments, variations in depth of encoding did not influence these patterns. These data suggest that greater recollection for affective events leads them to be more richly experienced in memory, and they are consistent with the idea that the states of remembering and knowing are experientially exclusive, whereas the processes underlying them are functionally independent.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

Section: Implications For Other Findings and Memory Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

Are affective events richly recollected or simply familiar? The experience and process of recognizing feelings past.

Ochsner¹

2000

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

602

114

533

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…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?…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Remembering emotional events

1992

Self Cite

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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 ...

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“…Emotional valence can also influence memory by increasing attention and controlled processes during encoding mediated by frontal cortices (Kensinger & Corkin, 2004), but there is less evidence about the effects of valence during retrieval in LM studies, perhaps because of difficulty in equating the arousal associated with positive and negative memories. Consistent with the influence of emotion on LM, AMs that are more arousing (Reisberg, Heuer, McLean, & O'Shaugnessy, 1988;Talarico, LaBar, & Rubin, 2004) AM retrieval is influenced by emotional intensity. For example, found that the emotional intensity associated with AM retrieval modulated activity in the hippocampus, although amygdala activity was not directly observed.…”

Section: Emotionmentioning

confidence: 56%

Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory

Jacques¹

2012

Understanding Autobiographical Memory

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Autobiographical memory (AM) refers to memory for events from our own personal past. Functional neuroimaging studies of AM are important because they can investigate the neural correlates of processes that are difficult to study using laboratory stimuli, including: complex constructive processes, subjective qualities of memory retrieval, and remote memory. Three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies are presented to examine these important contributions of AM. The first study investigates the neural correlates of temporal-order memory for autobiographical events using a novel photo paradigm. Participants took photographs at many campus locations over a period of several hours, and the following day they were scanned while making temporal-order judgments to pairs of photographs from different locations. It was found that temporal-order decisions associated with recollection recruited left prefrontal (PFC) and left posterior parahippocampal cortex, whereas temporal-order decisions relying on familiarity recruited greater activity in the right PFC.The second study examines self-projection, the capacity to re-experience the personal past and to mentally infer another person's perspective. A novel camera technology was used to examine self-projection by prospectively generating dynamic visuospatial images taken from a first-person perspective. Participants were literally asked to self-project into the personal past or into the life of another person. Selfv projection of one's own past self recruited greater ventral medial PFC (mPFC), and selfprojection of another individual recruited dorsal mPFC. Activity in ventral vs. dorsal mPFC was also sensitive to the ability to relive or understand the perspective taken on each trial. Further, task-related functional connectivity analysis revealed that ventral mPFC contributed to the medial temporal lobe network linked to memory processes, whereas dorsal mPFC contributed to the frontoparietal network linked to controlled processes.The third study focuses on the neural correlates underlying age-related differences in the recall of episodically rich AMs. Age-related attenuation in the episodic richness of AM was linked to reductions in activity elicited during elaboration.Age effects on AM were more pronounced during elaboration than search, with older adults showing less sustained recruitment of the hippocampus and ventrolateral PFC for less episodically rich AMs. Further, there was an age-related reduction in the top-down modulation of the PFC on the hippocampus by episodic richness, possibly reflecting fewer controlled processes operating on the recovery of information in the hippocampus.Ultimately, the goal of all memory research is to understand how memory operates in the real-world; the present research highlights the important contribution of functional neuroimaging studies of AM in attaining this goal.vi

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The quantity, not the quality, of affect predicts memory vividness

Cited by 84 publications

References 20 publications

Are affective events richly recollected or simply familiar? The experience and process of recognizing feelings past.

Are affective events richly recollected or simply familiar? The experience and process of recognizing feelings past.

Remembering emotional events

Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory

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