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Abstract:
Previous studies of both humans and non-human animals have
shown that emotionally arousing information is better remembered
than neutral information. However there are several potential
confounds that complicate the interpretation of those results. The
current study exercised more critical controls in item matching and
examined recall and recognition memory for positive and negative,
high and low arousal words presented both auditorally and visually.
Word frequency, syllable length, and imagery were controlled across
the types of words. Semantic relatedness of the words was also
considered. Recall was better for arousing compared to unarousing
words under both auditory and visual, incidental, semantic encoding
conditions. When written words were encoded under incidental,
shallow encoding conditions or intentionally encoded, arousing
words were not associated with better recall than unarousing words.
Recognition memory performance was not found to be sensitive to
emotional arousal, though a ceiling effect may have blocked the
results. This bias towards recalling arousing words during a deep
processing task can not be entirely attributed to word frequency,
imagery or semantic relatedness. As there was no evidence for a
bias towards recalling arousing words in a shallow processing task,
this effect may not reflect an automatic process.
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