Interference Effects of Emotional Arousal on Recognition Memory: Comparison of Within-object and Between-object Bindings
Aslan Karaaslan, Nour Siakir Oglou, Aycan KapucuDuygusal Uyarılmışlığın Tanıma Belleği Üzerindeki Ketleyici Etkisi: Nesne içi ve Nesneler arası Bağlantıların Karşılaştırılması
Aslan Karaaslan, Nour Siakir Oglou, Aycan KapucuA growing body of literature has demonstrated that emotionally arousing items are better remembered than non-arousing neutral items (e.g., Cahill & McGaugh, 1995). However, it is questionable whether the effect of emotional arousal on item memory also extends to associative memory.
According to Object-based Binding Theory (OBT; Mather, 2007) the effects of arousal on memory binding depend on “whether the elements to be bound are part of the same object as the arousing item or whether the binding has to occur between different objects” (Mather, 2007, p.12). The theory asserts that emotional arousal enhances binding when the items are within the arousing objects (within-object binding). On the other hand, emotional arousal either has no effect on binding, or even impairs it, when the item to be bound is outside the arousing item (between-object binding).
Besides learning associations, whether between-object or within-object, it is also essential to keep information in memory updated. Novak and Mather (2009) found that arousal impaired memory updating for within-object associations. Another study testing between-object binding showed that arousal enhanced memory updating (Mather & Knight, 2008). The present study, therefore, aims to directly compare the effects of negative arousal on memory updating for between-object and within-object associations. We predicted that high arousing stimuli would either impair updating or have no effect on it for within-object associations, but instead would facilitate updating for between-object associations.
Method
Seventy-three undergraduate sociology and psychology students (63 women, 10 men) with an average age of 21.7 years, participated in the experiment. The participants were randomly assigned to one of the experimental conditions: between-object and withinobject conditions. In both conditions, photographs of different types of hats were paired with angry (high arousal and negative), sad (low arousal and negative) or neutral female and male faces. Participants in the between-object condition saw the faces and hats on opposite sides of the screen, whereas participants in the within-object condition saw people (faces) wearing the hats. Participants were instructed that they were about to view a series of face-hat pairings and that they should study each pair for a subsequent memory test. At the first learning stage, participants were presented pairs in three emotional categories. At the second learning stage, the same faces were matched with new hats and the participants performed a similar task as in the first stage. In the test phase, half of the pairs of the second learning list were matched correctly, half were matched incorrectly, and participants were asked to decide which pair was correct or incorrect. In addition, a five-minute filler task was used between the learning and test phase.
Results
Following the analysis of variance for interaction, planned comparisons based on hypotheses were conducted for accuracy, false alarm, sensitivity, and bias measures.1 False alarms were higher for the angry faces paired with hats in the within-object condition than in the between-object condition, F(1, 71) = 5.26, p < .05, ηp 2 = .07. Furthermore, sensitivity results revealed that participants were better able to discriminate between correct and incorrect angry face-hat pairs in the between-object condition than in the within-object condition, F(1, 71) = 5.49, p < .05, ηp 2 = .07. Similarly, sadness pairs in the between-object conditions were better able to be discriminated than in the within object conditions, F(1, 71) = 7.69, p < .01, ηp 2 = .10. And, neutral pairs in the between-object conditions were better able to be discriminated than in the within object conditions, F(1, 71) = 4.93, p < .05, ηp 2 = .07. In addition, participants showed a more conservative response bias (were more likely to respond with the word “incorrect”) towards sad face-hat pairs compared to angry face-hat pairs in the within-object condition (p < .05).
Discussion
This study investigated the effects of negative high and low emotional arousal on the updating of memory for between-object and within-object associations via a proactive interference paradigm. As predicted, participants gave more false alarms to high arousing stimuli (hats paired with angry faces) in the within-object condition than in the betweenobject condition. At the same time, in terms of each emotion category, participants were better able to discriminate between correct and incorrect pairs in the between-object condition than in the within-object condition. These findings are consistent with OBT’s prediction (Mather, 2007) that remembering the internal properties of an object is more affected by emotional arousal. In addition, it has been shown that emotional arousal leads to memory impairment caused by proactive interference. Unexpectedly, there were no significant differences among emotion categories in the within-object or between-object conditions.