Does source memory impairment associated with emotionally arousing stimuli occur at encoding or retrieval?

Abstract

The present experiment investigated whether negatively arousing stimuli produce source memory impairment and whether the impairment occurs at encoding or retrieval. Participants were presented with negatively arousing, positively arousing, and neutral pictures. Each picture was followed by an instructional slide that indicated whether the picture was an Apple-kind or an Orange-kind. Item memory was assessed by free recall and source memory was assessed by asking participants to classify the recalled pictures into the two kinds of pictures. The results indicated that item memory was greater for the negatively arousing pictures than for the positively arousing and the neutral pictures. However, the negatively arousing pictures produced more misattribution errors than the neutral pictures, replicating source memory impairment. It was concluded that source memory impairment associated with negatively arousing stimuli occurs at encoding.

Keywords:

• Emotionally enhanced memory
• Source memory
• Misattribution errors

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Cody J. Bartow for help in data collection.

Notes

¹Although it is possible that the randomisation could result in two blocks of AA and OO pictures, the two types of picture were evenly distributed across the serial positions.

²One participant produced omission errors for three negatively arousing pictures, two positively arousing pictures, and three neutral pictures. This participant was included in the analysis because the errors were evenly distributed across the three types of pictures.