Memory bias for negative emotional words in recognition memory is driven by effects of category membership

Recognition memory studies often find that emotional items are more likely than neutral items to be labelled as studied. Previous work suggests this bias is driven by increased memory strength/familiarity for emotional items. We explored strength and bias interpretations of this effect with the conj...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition and emotion 2014-07, Vol.28 (5), p.867-880
Main Authors: White, Corey N., Kapucu, Aycan, Bruno, Davide, Rotello, Caren M., Ratcliff, Roger
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Affectivity. Emotion
Analysis of Variance
Bias
Biological and medical sciences
Category effects
Discrimination (Psychology) - physiology
Emotional memory
Emotional words
Emotions - physiology
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Learning. Memory
Membership
Memory
Memory - physiology
Memory bias
Personality. Affectivity
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Recognition (Psychology) - physiology
Recognition memory
ROC Curve
Students - psychology
Task Performance and Analysis
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Summary:Recognition memory studies often find that emotional items are more likely than neutral items to be labelled as studied. Previous work suggests this bias is driven by increased memory strength/familiarity for emotional items. We explored strength and bias interpretations of this effect with the conjecture that emotional stimuli might seem more familiar because they share features with studied items from the same category. Categorical effects were manipulated in a recognition task by presenting lists with a small, medium or large proportion of emotional words. The liberal memory bias for emotional words was only observed when a medium or large proportion of categorised words were presented in the lists. Similar, though weaker, effects were observed with categorised words that were not emotional (animal names). These results suggest that liberal memory bias for emotional items may be largely driven by effects of category membership.
ISSN:0269-9931
1464-0600
DOI:10.1080/02699931.2013.858028