Emotional Ambiguity and Memory

The emotional ambiguity hypothesis introduced the principle that uncertainty about items' valence determines how emotional content affects memory and other psychological processes. It was formulated to explain why correlations between the perceived valence and arousal of memory items range from...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. General 2021-08, Vol.150 (8), p.1476-1499
Main Authors: Brainerd, C. J., Chang, M., Bialer, D. M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Affective Valence
Ambiguity
Emotion Recognition
Emotions
Familiarity
Human
Judgment
mathematical models
Memory
Physiological Arousal
Prediction
psychology
Semantics
Stimulus Ambiguity
Theories
uncertainty
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Summary:The emotional ambiguity hypothesis introduced the principle that uncertainty about items' valence determines how emotional content affects memory and other psychological processes. It was formulated to explain why correlations between the perceived valence and arousal of memory items range from weak to unreliable, but it also makes novel predictions. Although data are consistent with those predictions, the hypothesis does not provide a process model of how valence ambiguity causes the valence-arousal relation to fluctuate. We tested 2 such models-a quantitative one, which assumes that increasing ambiguity lowers the reliability of valence judgments, and a categorical/quantitative one, which assumes that increasing ambiguity restricts the range of valence judgments. These models predict different mathematical relations between measures of ambiguity and intensity for valence and other semantic attributes (e.g., arousal, concreteness, familiarity, imagery, meaningfulness). In Experiments 1-3, tests of those predictions favored the categorical/quantitative model-showing that ambiguity is an inverted-U function for valence and other attributes. Experiments 4 and 5 were designed to investigate whether the memory effects of valence ambiguity are similar to the known effects of valence intensity. In both experiments, recall improved when ambiguity was increased, as well as when intensity was increased. A mathematical model revealed that increases in ambiguity produced large increases in items' familiarity, whereas increases in intensity produced smaller increases in both recollection and familiarity.
ISSN:0096-3445
1939-2222
DOI:10.1037/xge0001011