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Remembering emotional events

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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 intervalsemployed.inpaststudies 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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, Reed College, 97202, Portland, OR

    Alafair Burke, Friderike Heuer & Daniel Reisberg

Authors
  1. Alafair Burke

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  2. Friderike Heuer

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  3. Daniel Reisberg

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Correspondence toDaniel Reisberg.

Additional information

This research was supported by funds from the Pew Charitable Trust and from Reed College.

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