Reduced associative memory for negative information: impact of confidence and interactive imagery during study

ABSTRACT

Although item-memory for emotional information is enhanced, memory for associations between items is often impaired for negative, emotionally arousing compared to neutral information. We tested two possible mechanisms underlying this impairment, using picture pairs: 1) higher confidence in one’s own ability to memorise negative information may cause participants to under-study negative pairs; 2) better interactive imagery for neutral pairs could facilitate associative memory for neutral pairs more than for negative pairs. Tested with associative recognition, we replicated the impairment of associative memory for negative pairs. We also replicated the result that confidence in future memory (judgments of learning) was higher for negative than neutral pairs. Inflated confidence could not explain the impairment of associative recognition memory: Judgements of learning were positively correlated with associative memory success for both negative and neutral pairs. However, neutral pairs were rated higher in their conduciveness to interactive imagery than negative pairs, and this difference in interactive imagery showed a robust relationship to the associative memory difference. Thus, associative memory reductions for negative information are not due to differences in encoding effort. Instead, interactive imagery may be less effective for encoding of negative than neutral pairs.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• emotion
• paired associate learning
• imagery
• metacognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jeremy B. Caplan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8542-9900

Tobias Sommer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3504-7357

Christopher R. Madan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3228-6501

Esther Fujiwara http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4154-0145

Notes

1 Valence ratings, with “9” indicating positive valence, were available from 23 female raters only (Madan et al., 2018), covering all neutral pictures and 156 of the 160 possible negative pictures; valence ratings also differed as intended (negative: 3.11 ± 0.60; neutral: 5.18 ± 0.40; t(266.49) = 35.94, p < .001, d = 3.79). These ratings are not further detailed here.