Effects of level of processing on emotional memory: Gist and details

Abstract

The object of this study was to investigate whether level of processing (LOP) modulates enhanced memory performance for emotional stimuli, and, if so, whether the LOP effects relate to their gist and details. During the study phase, participants were presented with colourful pictures with negative, neutral and positive valences and encoded the emotional pictures under either a semantic (living/non-living judgement) or a perceptual (left/right position judgement) condition. During the test phase, they judged whether the presented picture was old or new in Experiments 1 and 2, and also judged whether a specific concept, labelled using words, had been studied in Experiment 2. The results showed that under both encoding conditions, the details of both negative and positive pictures were recognised better than those of neutral pictures. Also, the gist of negative pictures was recognised better than that of neutral pictures but only under the semantic condition. These data provide evidence that the LOP differentially modulates enhanced emotional memory for gist and details of pictures.

Keywords:

• Memory
• Emotion
• Level of processing
• Gist–details

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the Global Research Initiative Program, National Institute of Health, USA (R01TW007897, J. Yang, 2008), and the National Science Foundation of China (30870769, J. Yang, 2009).

We thank Dr Xiaolin Zhou from Peking University for his instructive comments on the manuscript.