Friderike Heuer

Remembering Emotional Events

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.

Vivid memories of emotional events: The accuracy of remembered minutiae

It has been claimed that emotional arousal causes a narrowing of attention, and, therefore, impoverished memory encoding. On this view, if details of an emotional event are reported subsequently, these details must be after-the-fact reconstructions that are open to error. Our study challenges these claims. Using a long-term (2-week), incidental learning procedure, wefound that emotion promotes memory both for information central to an event and for peripheral detail. This contrasts with the results of explicit instructions to remember or to attend closely to the event, both of which seem to promote memory for the event’s gist at the expense of detail. The likely mechanisms underlying these effects are discussed.

Memory for thematically arousing events.

Many studies have indicated that emotional arousalimproves memory for thecenter, or gist, of an event butundermines memory for the event’speriphery. However, all of these studies have elicited emotion by showing participants some salient visual stimulus intended to arouse them (e.g., the sight of a wound). This stimulus may have served as anattention magnet, and this, not the arousal, may have been the cause of the observed narrowing of memory. In this article, we examine how participants remember events that involvethematically induced arousal, arousal produced by empathy, rather than by a visual emotional stimulus. The data show that emotionality improves memory for all aspects of these events, with no memory narrowing.

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

Vivid or detailed memories are reliably associated with the recollection of emotional events. However, the mechanism through which emotionality has this impact remains unspecified. Our results indicate that the character of the emotion does not influence memory vividness; instead, vividness seems to be dependent only on the quantity of emotion that accompanies the event. We consider the implications of this for accounts of emotion’s effects.