Remembering emotional events: The fate of detailed information

Abstract

Previous research has shown that people remember details from emotional events differently than details from neutral events. However, past research suffers from inadequate equating of the details tested in the emotional and neutral events. In the current five experiments, involving a total of 397 subjects, we equated the to-be-remembered detail information. Subjects in these experiments were presented with a thematic series of slides in which the content of one critical slide in the middle of the series varied. When the critical slide was emotional (a woman injured near a bicycle), compared to neutral in nature (a woman riding a bicycle), subjects were better able to remember a central detail but less able to remember a peripheral detail. To determine whether the emotional event led to different performance simply because it was unusual, we included a third condition, in which subjects saw an “unusual” version of the event (a woman carrying a bicycle on her shoulder). Subjects in the unusual condition performed poorly when recalling both the central and the peripheral detail, and thus differently from those in the emotional condition. To determine what subjects were attending to, in Experiment 4 we gathered reports of thoughts that were evoked while subjects viewed the critical slide. Analyses of these reports indicated that differential elaboration occurred when people viewed emotional, unusual, and neutral events.