Culture impacts the magnitude of the emotion-induced memory trade-off effect

ABSTRACT

The present study assessed the extent to which culture impacts the emotion-induced memory trade-off effect. This trade-off effect occurs because emotional items are better remembered than neutral ones, but this advantage comes at the expense of memory for backgrounds such that neutral backgrounds are remembered worse when they occurred with an emotional item than with a neutral one. Cultures differ in their prioritisation of focal object versus contextual background information, with Westerners focusing more on objects and Easterners focusing more on backgrounds. Americans, a Western culture, and Turks, an Eastern-influenced culture, incidentally encoded positive, negative, and neutral items placed against neutral backgrounds, and then completed a surprise memory test with the items and backgrounds tested separately. Results revealed a reduced trade-off for Turks compared to Americans. Although both groups exhibited an emotional enhancement in item memory, Turks did not show a decrement in memory for backgrounds that had been paired with emotional items. These findings complement prior ones showing reductions in trade-off effects as a result of task instructions. Here, we suggest that a contextual-focus at the level of culture can mitigate trade-off effects in emotional memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• cognition
• memory
• emotion
• trade-off

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Rozi Levi and Peter Millar for their contributions to data collection and study administration, and thank Elizabeth Kensinger for helpful discussions and access to stimuli.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Angela Gutchess http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3047-5907

Notes

1. Note that different degrees of freedom reflect missing participant data.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, National Science Foundation under grant number (BCS-1147707) awarded to A.G. and by a BAGEP award of the Science Academy awarded to A.B.