Monitoring of learning for emotional faces: how do fine-grained categories of emotion influence participants’ judgments of learning and beliefs about memory?

ABSTRACT

Researchers have evaluated how broad categories of emotion (i.e. positive and negative) influence judgments of learning (JOLs) relative to neutral items. Specifically, JOLs are typically higher for emotional relative to neutral items. The novel goal of the present research was to evaluate JOLs for fine-grained categories of emotion. Participants studied faces with afraid, angry, sad, or neutral expressions (Experiment 1) and with afraid, angry, or sad expressions (Experiment 2). Participants identified the expressed emotion, made a JOL for each, and completed a recognition test. JOLs were higher for the emotional relative to neutral expressions. However, JOLs were insensitive to the categories of negative emotion. Using a survey design in Experiment 3, participants demonstrated idiosyncratic beliefs about emotion. Some people believed the fine-grained emotions were equally memorable, whereas others believed a specific emotion (e.g. anger) was most memorable. Thus, beliefs about emotion are nuanced, which has important implications for JOL theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• judgments of learning
• beliefs
• metamemory
• emotional expressions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. No participants were excluded from the experiments, and all measures and manipulations are reported for each.

2. All reported effects maintained when including all items the analyses in both Experiments 1 and 2.

3. Follow-up tests in all experiments used the Bonferonni correction.

4. Analyses of hits and false alarms are available upon request from the first author. Importantly, the proportion of hits and false alarms did not differ based on expression type in Experiments 1 or 2, ps > .06.

5. JOLs were only made for studied items; thus, gamma correlations could only be calculated for the hits and misses on the recognition test. Because of this, resolution does not account for response criterion and as such, caution should be taken when interpreting it.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a James S. McDonnell Foundation Collaborative Activity Award.