The Effects of Emotional Scenarios on Memory

Lecture Center Concourse

The emotion processing literature has shown that angry and happy emotions tend to increase individuals’ memory recall, while sad emotions typically decrease memory recall. In Kazanas (2016), an emotional advantage was found for face-name pairs when they were studied in an angry and happy context, but not in a sad context, when compared to neutral contexts. However, there was a potential confound such that the scenarios that showed an emotional advantage (happy, angry) were self-focused (e.g., you won an award) while those that did not (sad) were other-person-focused (e.g., your friend won an award). The purpose of this study was to see if changing the focus of an emotional scenario would affect the strength of participants’ memory recall. In the current experiment, participants studied face-name pairs of people they would hypothetically encounter in scenarios with a self- or other person-focus across happy, angry, sad, or neutral emotional contexts. We expect to find greatest memory recall for the face-name pairings when studied in a happy or angry emotional context, as compared to the sad and neutral contexts. This outcome will be amplified in a self-focused condition, as compared to the other- person-focused conditions.