Enhanced recognition memory for emotionally negative sounds Public
Morrow, Erin (Spring 2022)
Published
Abstract
Emotion typically enhances memory for emotional events relative to neutral events, a phenomenon often referred to as the emotional memory effect. Studies of this effect have used a variety of visual and verbal stimuli, but almost no studies have used emotional sounds (e.g., dogs snarling) and none have investigated recognition memory for emotional sounds. Thus, here we examined recognition memory for negative and neutral environmental sounds, predicting enhanced memory for negative stimuli. Based on the finding that emotional memory effects for visual stimuli are almost always reflected in the recollection component of recognition memory (remembering accompanied by contextual information) rather than the familiarity component (a sense of knowing without context), we further predicted that enhanced memory for emotional sounds would be reflected in recollection alone. To investigate these hypotheses, we conducted an online experiment in which participants first encoded 96 sounds (48 negative and 48 neutral). After a 15-minute delay, memory retrieval was assessed with a remember-familiar recognition memory task with semantically-matched target and distractor items to reduce the potential use of associated verbal descriptions. As predicted, recognition memory performance was enhanced for negative sounds relative to neutral sounds, and this enhancement was found for recollection, but not familiarity. Recognition performance was also higher for high- vs. low-arousal negative sounds. These results demonstrate that emotional enhancement effects observed for visual and verbal stimuli also extend to the auditory modality, and that, paralleling previous findings, this effect is reflected in recollection processes alone. These findings suggest that key properties of emotional memory are modality independent and help pave the way for future neuroimaging studies of memory for emotional sounds which can determine the extent to which the neural mechanisms of emotional memory are similar across stimulus modalities.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Materials and Methods 9
Participants 9
Stimuli 9
Online Sound Presentation 11
Procedure 11
Statistical Analysis 13
Results 15
Discussion 19
Figure 1. Encoding trial procedure 25
Figure 2. Retrieval trial procedure 25
Figure 3. Valence rating trial procedure for sounds 26
Figure 4. Mean valence ratings from study participants for negative and neutral sounds 27
Figure 5. Mean arousal ratings from study participants for negative and neutral sounds 28
Figure 6. Distribution of sound stimuli ranked by mean arousal ratings 29
Figure 7. Relationship between mean arousal and valence ratings from study participants 30
Figure 8. Mean d’ discriminability scores for negative and neutral sounds 31
Figure 9. Mean corrected recognition for negative and neutral sounds 32
Figure 10. Mean hit rate for negative and neutral sounds 33
Figure 11. Mean hit rate for high-arousal and low-arousal negative sounds 34
Figure 12. Mean false alarm rate for negative and neutral sounds 35
Figure 13. Mean d’ discriminability measures by valence and perceptual repetitiveness 36
Figure 14. Mean memory estimates by recollection/familiarity and valence 37
Figure 15. Mean response times for familiarity (4 or 5) and recollection (6) responses 38
Figure 16. Mean response times for all remember-familiar test responses 39
Appendix A: Remember-familiar recognition memory test instructions 40
References 41
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