The influences of valence and arousal on judgments of learning and on recall

Hourihan, Kathleen L. and Fraundorf, Scott H. and Benjamin, Aaron S. (2016) The influences of valence and arousal on judgments of learning and on recall. Memory & Cognition, 45 (1). pp. 121-136. ISSN 1532-5946

[img] [English] PDF (The version available in this research repository is a postprint. It has the same peer-reviewed content as the published version, but lacks publisher layout and branding.) - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial.

Download (725kB)

Abstract

Much is known about how the emotional content of words affects memory for those words, but only recently have researchers begun to investigate whether emotional content influences metamemory—that is, learners’ assessments of what is or is not memorable. The present study replicated recent work demonstrating that judgments of learning (JOLs) do indeed reflect the superior memorability of words with emotional content. We further contrasted two hypotheses regarding this effect: a physiological account in which emotional words are judged to be more memorable because of their arousing properties, versus a cognitive account in which emotional words are judged to be more memorable because of their cognitive distinctiveness. Two results supported the latter account. First, both normed arousal (Exp. 1) and normed valence (Exp. 2) independently influenced JOLs, even though only an effect of arousal would be expected under a physiological account. Second, emotional content no longer influenced JOLs in a design (Exp. 3) that reduced the primary distinctiveness of emotional words by using a single list of words in which normed valence and arousal were varied continuously. These results suggest that the metamnemonic benefit of emotional words likely stems from cognitive factors.

Item Type: Article
URI: http://research.library.mun.ca/id/eprint/15533
Item ID: 15533
Keywords: emotion, metamemory, recall
Department(s): Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of > Psychology
Science, Faculty of > Psychology
Date: 15 August 2016
Date Type: Publication
Digital Object Identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-016-0646-3
Related URLs:

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over the past year

View more statistics