Arts, Emotion, and Learning Research References
Adelman, J. S., & Estes, Z. (2013). Emotion and memory: A recognition advantage for positive
and negative words independent of arousal. Cognition, 129(3), 530-535. doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.08.014
"Both negative and positive stimuli were remembered better than neutral stimuli,
whether arousing or calming. Arousal failed to predict recognition memory, either
independently or interactively with valence [i.e. whether the emotion is positive or
negative, as opposed to neutral]. Results support models that posit a facilitative role of
valence in memory" (p. 530).
Baker-Ward, L. E., Eaton, K. L., & Banks, J. B. (2005). Young Soccer Players' Reports of a
Tournament Win or Loss: Different Emotions, Different Narratives. Journal of Cognition
& Development, 6(4), 507-527. doi: 10.1207/s15327647jcd0604_4
Ten-year-olds from opposing teams in a soccer championship were interviewed
immediately after the game and again five weeks later.
"Participants on winning teams rated their individual performance higher at the second
interview...than they had at the first interview...whereas participants from teams that
lost reported lower ratings at the second interview" (p. 521).
"Participants from winning teams rated their pre-event perception of the importance of
the game’s outcome higher than did the children from teams that lost" (p. 522).
"Children from winning teams reported that they had had, on the average,
conversations about the event on 4.67 occasions (SD = .96), a number significantly
greater than the 2.25 (SD = 3.50) discussions reported by the members of losing teams,
t(16) = 2.29, p < .05" (p. 522).
"The two groups did, however, change their global impressions of a significant aspect of
the game. It is not surprising that the children from winning teams rated the quality of
their play as higher than the children from losing teams rated theirs. However, it is
noteworthy that over time, the groups diverged even further, with the children who lost
the game seeing themselves as playing even more poorly and the children who won
elevating their assessment of their play....The children from winning teams focused on
the central components of a game that turned out well for them, whereas the children
who experienced a negative outcome emphasized the reasons for their defeat in their
narratives, examining the mistakes or limitations in their performances" (p. 523).
Barsalou, L., Breazeal, C., & Smith, L. (2007). Cognition as coordinated non-cognition. Cognitive
Processing, 8(2), 79-91. doi: 10.1007/s10339-007-0163-1
Excellent review posing argument that cognition is encoded in the brain in terms of
experience, not abstract concepts.
"Knowledge has no existence separate from process" (p. 80).
"Cognition divorced from affect is not rationale [sic], and...optimal cognitive
performance occurs when affective information is included in decision
making....Affective mechanisms play central roles in cognition, and a full understanding
of cognition is impossible without them" (p. 82).
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"Executive systems are also necessary for maintaining goals in working memory, and
for deciding when to pursue or drop goals" (p. 82).
"The fact that high-level cognitive judgments depended on...bodily states and the
affective states that they engendered demonstrates the pervasive dependencey of
cognition on contributing motor and affective systems" (p. 82).
"Cognition is more than a collection of independent processes. Instead, we believe that
cognition, and especially the magic of human cognition, emerges from deep
dependencies between all the basic systems in the brain, including goal management,
perception, action, memory, reward, affect, and learning. We also belive that human
cognition greatly reflects its social evolution and context, as well as major contributions
from a developmental process. Because we believe that human congnition reflects all
these dependencies, we believe that it is necessary to change how we study it" (p. 89).
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded Cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59(1), 617-645. doi:
10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639
Compelling evidence is presented supporting the argument that the brain does not
primarily store and retrieve knowledge in the form of abstract symbols. Rather, the
process of creating cognitive meaning involves the brain actively referencing the areas
of the brain where perceptual, motor, and instrospectve experiences are encoded. These
findings have important implications for educational practice.
"When conceptual knowledge about objects is represented, brain areas that represent
their properties during perception and action become active" (p. 627).
"People simiulate affective states during comprehension....Barrett (2006) suggests that
affective simulation underlies the conceptualization of emotion that occurs in
comprehension and other processes" (p. 629).
Breslin, C. W., & Safer, M. A. (2011). Effects of Event Valence on Long-Term Memory for Two
Baseball Championship Games. Psychological Science, 22(11), 1408-1412. doi:
10.1177/0956797611419171
This is a study of fans' memories regarding two baseball championship games.
"Fans remembered the game their team won significantly more accurately than the
game their team lost. Fans also reported more vividness and more rehearsal for the
game their team won. We conclude that individuals rehearse positive events more than
comparable negative events, and that this additional rehearsal increases both vividness
and accuracy of memories about positive events. Our results differ from those of prior
studies involving memories for negative events that may have been unavoidably
rehearsed; such rehearsal may have kept those memories from fading. Long-term
memory for an event is determined not only by the valence of the event, but also by
experiences after the event" (p. 1408)
Brosch, T., Pourtois, G., & Sander, D. (2010). The perception and categorisation of emotional
stimuli: A review. Cognition & Emotion, 24(3), 377-400. doi:
10.1080/02699930902975754
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"Emotion is a strong incentive for perception and...emotionally relevant words or
images may produce both qualitataive and quantitative changes in the speed and
amount of what is eventually perceived by the individual" (p. 391).
"Perception is a highly dynamic, proactive process, which influences and is reciprocally
influenced by other processes, including emotional processes, through dynamic
interactions" (p. 394).
"Emotional stimuli in general are prioritised in perception, are detected more rapidly
and gain access to conscious awareness more easily than non-emotional stimuli" (p.
395).
Chambers, A. M., & Payne, J. D. (2014). Laugh yourself to sleep: memory consolidation for
humorous information. Experimental brain research, 232(5), 1415-1427.
"There is extensive evidence that emotional information is better remembered than
neutral information across long delays, especially if the delay interval contains an
opportunity for sleep" (p. 1415).
"Humor exerts a lasting impact on memory" (p. 1425).
Humorous cartoons were remembered better over a 12-hour delay than literal or wierd
cartoons. However, after sleep, even though the humorous cartoons were better
remembered, they were not considered as funny by the participants as they originally
had been.
Christianson, S. Å., Forth, A. E., Hare, R. D., Strachan, C., Lidberg, L., & Thorell, L. H. (1996).
Remembering details of emotional events: A comparison between psychopathic and
nonpsychopathic offenders. Personality and Individual Differences, 20(4), 437-443. doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(95)00220-0
"Research indicates that recall of the central details of a negative emotional event is
better than is recall for peripheral details. We predicted that psychopaths—because of
their difficulty in processing emotional information—would not show this narrowing of
attention for negative events....The nonpsychopaths recalled the central detail of the
emotional slide far better than they did the peripheral detail; that is, they showed the
expected narrowing of attention with negative emotion. The psychopaths, on the other
hand, failed to show this effect; their recall of the central and peripheral details was the
same for the emotional slide as it was for the neutral slide. The results provide further
support for the hypothesis that psychopaths have difficulty in processing emotional
information" (p. 437).
Cordon, I. M., Melinder, A. M., Goodman, G. S., & Edelstein, R. S. (2013). Children’s and adults’
memory for emotional pictures: Examining age-related patterns using the
Developmental Affective Photo System. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114(2),
339-356.
Two studies were conducted to examine theoretical questions about children’s and
adults’ memory for emotional visual stimuli. ...Pictures were presented to 20 8- to 12year-olds and 30 adults, followed by a recognition memory test. Children and adults
recognized aversive images better than neutral images. Moreover, children and adults
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recognized high and moderate arousal images more accurately than low arousal images.
Adults’ memory for neutral images exceeded that of children, but there were no
developmental differences in memory for aversive pictures.
Diaz, M. T., He, G., Gadde, S., Bellion, C., Belger, A., Voyvodic, J. T., & McCarthy, G. (2011). The
influence of emotional distraction on verbal working memory: An fMRI investigation
comparing individuals with schizophrenia and healthy adults. Journal of Psychiatric
Research, 45(9), 1184-1193. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2011.02.008
Funtional MRI scans show that working memory in healthy adults is disrupted more by
interruptions with emotional content than by interruptions without emotional content.
This distinction is not apparent in adults with schizophrenia suggesting "that
individuals with schizophrenia fail to differentiate emotional and neutral events" (p.
1191).
Dolan, M., & Fullam, R. (2005). Memory for emotional events in violent offenders with antisocial
personality disorder. Personality and Individual Differences, 38(7), 1657-1667. doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2004.09.028
"There is now fairly extensive empirical evidence that psychopaths have attenuated
electro-dermal responses in anticipation of aversive stimuli…and attenuated startle
responses to unpleasant slides….The latter findings are consistent with a hypothesised
deficit in neural circuits involved in the processing of negative affect e.g. amygdala" (p.
1658).
"Our findings largely fit with Christianson et al. (1996) report that psychopathic and
non-psychopathic criminals were more impaired in the recall of emotional material
than controls. However, in this study the highly psychopathic group were impaired in
free recall, in particular, suggesting that emotional information may not be as readily
‘‘burned into memory’’ in this group perhaps because they are less readily aroused by
such scenes" (p. 1664).
Even, S. (2008). Moving in(to) Imaginary Worlds: Drama Pedagogy for Foreign Language
Teaching and Learning. Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German, 41(2), 161-170. doi:
10.1111/j.1756-1221.2008.00021.x
"Drama pedagogy stands out from other teaching and learning approaches in that both
kinesthetic and emotional dimensions are strongly brought into play—the learners have
to physically act within a given situation and empathize with others" (p. 162)
"Learners are confronted with ficticious situations that require not only their
intellectual-linguistic faculties but also body language, joint negotion of meanings, and
emotional understanding. These kinesthetic, social, and empathic learning moments
make for intensive and lasting experiences with the foreign language, literature, and
culture" (p. 162).
"Imitating the sitting posture [of a statue referenced in the literature being studied]
helps learners get a bodily-kinesthetic impression of the statue, and the empathy
questions are designed to encourage them to develop their own thoughts and ideas
shaped by the position they have adopted" (p. 165).
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"Drama pedagogy stands out from other teaching and learning approaches in that both
kinesthetic and emotional dimensions are strongly brought into play—the learners have
to physically act within a given situation and empathize with others" (p. 162).
Fivush, R., Hazzard, A., Sales, J. M., Sarfati, D., & Brown, T. (2003). Creating coherence out of
chaos? Children's narratives of emotionally positive and negative events. Applied
Cognitive Psychology, 17(1), 1-19. doi: 10.1002/acp.854
"In this study we interviewed 5- to 12-year-old children growing up in violent
communities about both emotionally positive and negative experiences. Children were
able to report a great deal of information about both types of events, but they reported
more objects and people, and used more descriptive detail, when narrating positive
experiences. In contrast, children included more information about their thoughts and
emotions when narrating negative experiences, and recounted these experiences more
coherently" (p. 1).
"Overall, then, it appears that children are more focused on external attributes, objects
in the world, and creating a descriptively rich story when reporting positive events, but
more focused on the internal landscape, their feelings and thoughts, when reporting
more emotionally negative experiences. The focus on one’s own reactions to an event
may also relate to the finding that emotionally negative events were recounted in a
more coherent narrative form than positive events. Positive experiences may not
require explanation, but negative experiences might, and making sense of an event may
lead to focusing on what that event means to the self. Focusing on thoughts and feelings
may help one to make internal sense of an experience, to create a meaningful personal
story. Indeed, events within the emotionally negative category rated as more highly
stressful included more internal state language than events rated as less stressful,
supporting the idea that as events become more challenging for the self, there is an
increasing focus on one’s thoughts and feelings" (p. 14).
Fivush, R., Sales, J. M., Goldberg, A., Bahrick, L., & Parker, J. (2004). Weathering the storm:
Children's long-term recall of Hurricane Andrew. Memory, 12(1), 104.
"Children who experienced a highly stressful natural disaster, Hurricane Andrew, were
interviewed within a few months of the event, when they were 3±4 years old, and again
6 years later, when they were 9±10 years old. Children were grouped into low,
moderate, or high stress groups depending on the severity of the experienced storm. All
children were able to recall this event in vivid detail 6 years later. In fact, children
reported over twice as many propositions at the second interview as at the first. At the
initial interview, children in the high stress group reported less information than
children in the moderate stress group, but 6 years later, children in all three stress
groups reported similar amounts of information. However children in the high stress
group needed more questions and prompts than children in the other stress groups. Yet
children in the high stress group also reported more consistent information between
the two interviews, especially about the storm, than children in the other stress groups.
Implications for children's developing memory of stressful events are discussed" (p.
104).
"Provocatively, although children in the high stress group showed some decrements in
retrieval, what they did report was overwhelmingly more consistent over time than
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information reported by children in the moderate and low stress groups, and this was
particularly true for the most stressful parts of the experience. Indeed, more than 50%
of the propositions recalled about the storm itself at Time 1 were recalled again at Time
2" (p. 115).
Flom, R., Janis, R. B., Garcia, D. J., & Kirwan, C. B. (2014). The effects of exposure to dynamic
expressions of affect on 5-month-olds’ memory. Infant Behavior and Development, 37(4),
752-759. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2014.09.006
Excellent review of research literature on afffect and learning. Many studies support the
claim that emotion affects learning.
Five-month-old infants were exposed to a dynamic adult face and voice showing happy,
angry, or neutral emotion and were then shown a geometric shape. After five minutes,
the infants who had seen the happy face and voice preferred the geometric shape they
had been shown. Those with neutral or angry face exposures showed no preference.
"These results are the first to demonstrate that 5-month-olds' visual recognition
memory is affected by the presentation of affective information at the time of encoding"
(p. 752).
Gable, P., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2010). The motivational dimensional model of affect:
Implications for breadth of attention, memory, and cognitive categorisation. Cognition
and Emotion, 24(2), 322-337. doi: 10.1080/02699930903378305
"Over twenty years of research have examined the cognitive consequences of positive
affect states, and suggested that positive affect leads to a broadening of cognition....More
recently, we have systematically examined positive affect that varies in approach
motivational intensity, and found that positive affect high in approach motivation (e.g.,
desire) narrows cognition, whereas positive affect low in approach motivation broadens
cognition.... In this article we will review past models and present a motivational
dimension model of affect that expands understanding of how affective states influence
attentional and cognitive breadth. We then review research that has varied the
motivational intensity of positive and negative affect and found that affect of low
motivational intensity broadens cognitive processes, whereas affect of high
motivational intensity narrows cognitive processes" (p.322).
Gable, P. A., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2010). The effect of low versus high approach-motivated
positive affect on memory for peripherally versus centrally presented information.
Emotion, 10(4), 599-603. doi: 10.1037/a0018426
"Emotions influence attention and processes involved in memory. Although some
research has suggested that positive affect categorically influences these processes
differently than neutral affect, recent research suggests that motivational intensity of
positive affective states influences these processes. The present experiments examined
memory for centrally or peripherally presented information after the evocation of
approach-motivated positive affect. Experiment 1 found that, relative to neutral
conditions, pregoal, approach-motivated positive affect (caused by a monetary
incentives task) enhanced memory for centrally presented information, whereas
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postgoal, low approach-motivated positive affect enhanced memory for peripherally
presented information. Experiment 2 found that, relative to a neutral condition, high
approach-motivated positive affect (caused by appetitive pictures) enhanced memory
for centrally presented information but hindered memory for peripheral information.
These results suggest a more complex relationship between positive affect and memory
processes and highlight the importance of considering the motivational intensity of
positive affects in cognitive processes" (p. 599).
Gable, P. A., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2011). Attentional consequences of pregoal and postgoal
positive affects. Emotion, 11(6), 1358-1367. doi: 10.1037/a0025611
"Decades of research have suggested that all positive affective states broaden attention.
Recent studies have found that positive affects high in approach motivation narrow
attention, whereas positive affects low in approach motivation broaden attention.
However, these studies were limited because they used only affective pictures to
manipulate positive affect....The current experiments manipulated pregoal (high
approach) and postgoal (low approach) positive states by giving participants the
opportunity to win money on a game. Results revealed that pregoal positive affect
caused a narrowing of attention, whereas postgoal positive affect caused a broadening
of attention" (p. 1358).
Gordon, B. N. B.-W. L. P. A. (2001). Children's Testimony: A Review of Research on Memory for
Past Experiences. Clinical Child & Family Psychology Review, 4(2), 157-181.
"Under certain circumstances even very young children remember past events and can
provide surprisingly rich accounts of these experiences .... Moreover, these memories
often endure for very long periods of time" (p. 157).
Hadley, C. B., & MacKay, D. G. (2006). Does emotion help or hinder immediate memory? Arousal
versus priority-binding mechanisms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 32(1), 79-88. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.32.1.79
"People recall taboo words better than neutral words in many experimental
contexts.....Under binding theory...taboo superiority reflects an interference effect:
Because the emotional reaction system prioritizes binding mechanisms for linking the
source of an emotion to its context, taboo words capture the mechanisms for encoding
list context in mixed lists, impairing the encoding of adjacent neutral words when
[testing] rates are sufficiently rapid. However, for pure or unmixed lists, binding theory
predicted no better recall of taboo-only than of neutral-only lists at fast or slow rates.
Present results supported this prediction, suggesting that taboo superiority in
immediate recall reflects context-specific binding processes, rather than context-free
arousal effects, or emotion-linked differences in rehearsal, processing time, output
interference, time-based decay, or guessing biases" (p. 79).
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Harmon-Jones, E., Gable, P. A., & Price, T. F. (2012). The influence of affective states varying in
motivational intensity on cognitive scope. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience, 6.
"We review a program of research that has suggested that affective states high in
motivationally intensity (e.g., enthusiasm, disgust) narrow cognitive scope, whereas
affective states low in motivationally intensity (e.g., joy, sadness) broaden cognitive
scope. Further supporting this interpretation, indices of brain activations, derived from
human electroencephalography, suggest that the motivational intensity of the affective
state predicts the narrowing of cognitive scope….In the end, the review highlights how
emotion can impair and improve certain cognitive processes" (p. 1).
"We posit that pre-goal, high approach-motivated positive affective states, such as
desire and enthusiasm, narrow cognitive scope, so that organisms are not distracted by
peripheral details that may impede goal pursuit. In contrast, post-goal, low approachmotivated positive affective states, such as satisfaction, promote openness to new
opportunities. After the goal is accomplished, a broad cognitive scope allows new goal
opportunities to be identified and later pursued. Low approach-motivated negative
affect, such as sadness, also broadens cognitive scope. When goals are terminally
blocked and motivation lowers, broadened attention may assist in finding new solutions
to the goal or finding a new goal" (p. 2).
"The evidence we reviewed suggests a revision to the well-accepted idea that positive
affect broadens and negative affect narrows the scope of cognition. The reviewed
evidence is consistent with previous evidence but suggests that previous results likely
occurred because affective valence was confounded with motivational intensity: low
motivationally intense positive affects were compared with high motivationally intense
negative affects. The reviewed research manipulated affective valence independently of
motivational intensity, and found that affective states low in motivational intensity
broaden and affective states high in motivational intensity narrow the scope of
cognition. Further research is needed to investigate the role of specific neural regions
(e.g., amygdala, nucleus accumbens) and neurochemical pro- cesses (e.g., dopamine,
opioids) within these regions in the effect of emotive states on attentional
scope….Together, this body of research suggests that emotion may impair and improve
cognitive processes depending on the situation in which the emotion occurs" (p. 4).
Harmon-Jones, E., Gable, P. A., & Price, T. F. (2013). Does negative affect always narrow and
positive affect always broaden the mind? Considering the influence of motivational
intensity on cognitive scope. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(4), 301-307.
"This research has found that affects of low motivational intensity broaden cognitive
scope whereas affects of high motivational intensity narrow cognitive scope, regardless
of the positivity or negativity of the affective state" (p. 301).
Hudson, J. A. F. R. (1991). As time goes by: Sixth graders remember a kindergarten experience.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, 5(4), 347-360.
Kindergarten children took a class field trip to a museum of archaeology. They were
interviewed (with and without cueing) to test their recall of the experience the day of
the trip, six weeks later, one year later, and six years later.
"Most striking were the effects of cueing on memory over time. Without specific cues
the event was forgotten by almost all of the children after 1 year, but with cues, 87 per
cent of the children could recall details of the event even after 6 years....Forgetting in
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autobiographic memory seems to involve three processes: decreases in amount
recalled, changes in acessibility and changes in memory content" (p. 347).
Kensinger, E. A., Garoff-Eaton, R. J., & Schacter, D. L. (2006). Memory for specific visual details
can be enhanced by negative arousing content. Journal of Memory and Language, 54(1),
99-112. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2005.05.005
This study college students' memories for pictures of items that had been rated as
neutral or negative.
"With sufficient processing time, negative arousing content appears to enhance the
likelihood that visual details are remembered about an object" (p. 99).
Kensinger, E. A., Garoff-Eaton, R. J., & Schacter, D. L. (2007). Effects of emotion on memory
specificity: Memory trade-offs elicited by negative visually arousing stimuli. Journal of
Memory and Language, 56(4), 575-591. doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2006.05.004
"Two different types of trade-offs have been discussed with regard to memory for
emotional information: A trade-off in the ability to remember the gist versus the visual
detail of emotional information, and a trade-off in the ability to remember the central
emotional elements of an event versus the nonemotional (peripheral) elements of that
same event....The results revealed that there is a pervasive memory trade-off for central
emotional versus peripheral nonemotional elements of scenes. With some encoding
tasks, a trade-off for gist versus visual detail also resulted, but this trade-off occurred
only when memory for the nonemotional background of a scene was assessed. There
was no gist/detail trade-off for the emotional objects in a scene" (p. 575).
Kensinger, E. A., & Schacter, D. L. (2007). Remembering the specific visual details of presented
objects: Neuroimaging evidence for effects of emotion. Neuropsychologia, 45(13), 29512962. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.05.024
"Memories can be retrieved with varied amounts of visual detail, and the emotional
content of information can influence the likelihood that visual detail is remembered. In
the present fMRI experiment (conducted with 19 adults scanned using a 3 T magnet),
we examined the neural processes that correspond with recognition of the visual details
of negative and neutral items. Results revealed that a region of the left fusiform gyrus
corresponded with retrieval of visual details for both negative and neutral items.
Activity in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, in contrast, was related to retrieval of
visual details only for negative items. Activity in these regions corresponded only with
successful recognition, and not with false recognition, providing strong evidence that
limbic engagement during retrieval does not correspond merely with a person’s belief that
detail has been recognized. Rather, limbic engagement appears to relate specifically to the
successful recognition of information" (p. 2951. italics added).
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Levine, L. J. & Edelstein, R. S. (2009). Emotion and memory narrowing: A review and goalrelevance approach. Cognition & Emotion, 23(5), 833-875. doi:
10.1080/02699930902738863
"People typically show excellent memory for information that is central to an emotional
event but poorer memory for peripheral details....To make sense of both the general
pattern that emotion leads to memory narrowing and findings that violate this
pattern...This review helps to clarify when and how emotion enhances
memory....Evidence shows that memory narrowing as a result of emotion, and a number
of violations of the memory narrowing pattern, can be explained by the view that
emotion enhances memory for information relevant to currently active goals" (p. 833).
"Memory narrowing as a result of emotion has been demonstrated in numerous studies
but several sources of controversy remain. Defining 'central' is one. What constitutes
the core of an emotional event?...Defining central information in terms of goal relevance
helps clarify when emotion leads to memory narrowing and when it does not" (p. 834,
italics added).
"Even before people are aware that they have perceived a stimulus, its emotional value can
produce an autonomoic response and influence evaluative judgments....Relative to neutral
stimuli...emotional stimuli benefit from faster, more efficient, and more extensive early
processing" (p. 837, italics added).
"Once a stimulus has attracted attention...emotional information is more likely than
neutral information to hold attention and be rehearsed in working memory, increasing
the likelihood that it will be stored in long-term memory" (p. 839).
"Over time, memory advantages for emotional material are further augmented while
memory for neutral material tends to fade...Distinctiveness, rehearsal, and consolidation
all contribute to long-term retention of emotional events" (pp. 839-840).
"It is well established...that events with emotional significance receive privileged
processing in several memory systems. Preferential access to early informationprocessing resources, more rehearsal, greater consolidation, and the presence of
retrieval cues all contribute to enhanced memory for emotional information relative to
neutral information" (p. 842).
"The negative effection of emotion on memory for peripheral details can be attributed,
at least in part, to neglect" (p. 842).
"Memory impairment can also result from stress....Long-term, chronic stress...reliably
impairs memory" (p. 843).
"Thus, the source of emotional arousal benefits from privileged processing, resulting in
the typical pattern of enhanced memory for core features of emotional events and
poorer memory for peripheral features" (p. 844).
"When experiencing negative emotion or desire (signalling that a goal is treathened or
anticipated), people tend to adopt a detail-oriented, bottom-up strategy when encoding
and retrieving events. When experiencing positive emotion (signalling that goals have
been attained), people tend to draw on relational knowledge, sometimes confusing
plausible and actual events. These different information-processing strategies affect
memory narrowing, with negative emotion and desire leading to detailed and accurate
memory for goal-relevant central information, and positive emotion following goal
attainment leading to a broader focus and less accuracy" (pp. 859-860).
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Liu, Y., & Wang, Z. (2014). Positive Affect and Cognitive Control Approach—Motivation Intensity
Influences the Balance Between Cognitive Flexibility and Stability. Psychological Science,
25(5), 1116-1123.
"In most prior research, positive affect has been consistently found to promote cognitive
flexibility. However, the motivational dimensional model of affect assumes that the
influence of positive affect on cognitive processes is modulated by approach-motivation
intensity. In the present study, we extended the motivational dimensional model to the
domain of cognitive control by examining the effect of low- versus high-approachmotivated positive affect on the balance between cognitive flexibility and stability in an
attentional-set-shifting paradigm. Results showed that low-approach-motivated
positive affect promoted cognitive flexibility but also caused higher distractibility,
whereas high-approach-motivated positive affect enhanced perseverance but
simultaneously reduced distractibility. These results suggest that the balance between
cognitive flexibility and stability is modulated by the approach-motivation intensity of
positive affective states. Therefore, it is essential to incorporate motivational intensity
into studies on the influence of affect on cognitive control" (p. 1116).
Mather, M., & Sutherland, M. R. (2011). Arousal-biased competition in perception and memory.
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological
Science, 6(2), 114-133. doi: 10.1177/1745691611400234
"Neuroimaging studies have found that negative items that are later remembered
recruit brain regions involved in sensory processing more than positive items that are
later remembered...whereas the encoding of positive items is associated with greater
activation in regions associated with semantic or conceptual processing" (p. 127).
"Positive stimuli cueing high approach motivation tend to have higher arousal than lowapproach-motivation positive stimuli (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2010a), and thus high
arousal positive stimuli seem to enhance memory for stimuli presented in the central
task-relevant location but not memory for peripheral stimuli—a finding that is
consistent with ABC [arousal-biased competition] predictions" (p. 127-128).
"ABC theory proposes that when initially processing information, arousal influences
competition between different stimuli for mental resources, increasing processing of
high priority stimuli and decreasing processing of low priority stimuli. Furthermore,
ABC theory posits that arousal experienced during or just after an event biases memory
consolidation in favor of high priority information from the event and against low
priority information from that event. Priority is determined by bottom–up perceptual
salience and top–down relevance.
Thus, arousal should enhance processing and consolidation of high priority
information, regardless of whether the informa- tion has priority because of its bottom–
up attention grabbing nature or because of top–down goals such as the desire to
remember it later. This winner-take-more effect may be adaptive. Arousal is likely to be
associated with challenging, important, or threatening events, for which fast and
focused responding is critical. Enhanced processing of salient, surprisng, or goalrelevant stimuli should improve performance under such circumstances. Later,
remembering the high prior- ity information from the event could improve future
strategies for dealing with similar situations. But the increased advantage of high
priority information comes at the expense of low prior- ity information that garners
even fewer neural resources under arousal than it would otherwise" (p. 128).
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May, C., Owens, M., & Einstein, G. O. (2012). The impact of emotion on prospective memory and
monitoring: No pain, big gain. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19(6), 1165-1171. doi:
10.3758/ BF03193014, 10.1037/ 0278-7393.30.4.756
People were asked to remember to do something in the future when a certain cue was
given.
"The emotionally enhanced memory effect is robust across studies of retrospective
memory, with heightened recall for items with emotional content (e.g., words like
'murder') relative to neutral items (e.g., words like 'envelope').... In our study, we
assessed Prospective Memory [PM, or remembering to do something in the future]
performance when PM targets were neutral, negative, and positive, and also
investigated monitoring across these different PM target types. Participants showed
heightened PM performance for positive and negative relative to neutral targets, yet
there was no evidence of additional monitoring for emotional targets. In fact, measures
of monitoring were significantly reduced when the PM targets were emotional rather
than neutral. Our findings suggest that it is possible to boost PM performance in a focal
task using emotional cues, and that the use of emotional cues reduces the need for
monitoring" (p. 1165).
Peterson, C. N. (2001). Five years later: children's memory for medical emergencies. Applied
Cognitive Psychology, 15(7), S7-S24.
"Children who had been 2–13 years of age at the time of a medical emergency (an injury
serious enough to require hospital ER treatment) were re-interviewed about their
injury and treatment five years after injury, and three years after a previous interview.
The children showed excellent recall of the central components of their injury
experience, although their recall of hospital treatment was more incomplete. Thus, both
the nature of the event being recalled (the injury versus the hospital treatment) and the
centrality of information (central versus peripheral) were important. The recall of 2year-olds, although not as good as that of children just a year older, did not fit with
predictions of infantile amnesia since they recalled a considerable amount about their
injury. High stress levels at the time of the target experiences had little effect on the
highly memorable injury event, but seemed to facilitate children's recall of central
components of the hospital event—the event that they had a harder time remembering.
Implications for eyewitness testimony are discussed" (p. S7).
Schettino, A., Loeys, T., & Pourtois, G. (2013). Multiple synergistic effects of emotion and
memory on proactive processes leading to scene recognition. NeuroImage, 81(0), 81-95.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.04.115
"Emotion is no longer seen as a byproduct of perception but, instead, as a core
determinant of it" (p. 81).
"Regardless of the memory status of the scenes (old vs. new), participants dwelt longer
on emotional compared to neutral scenes" (p. 90).
"Interestingly, we found that [brain] activity...was influenced by the emotional content
of the scenes, though at different stages during the accumulation of evidence depending
on the actual memory status of these scenes. These results suggest that emotion may
exert pervasive effects on these proactive processes during scene recognition" (p. 91).
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Conclusions: Perception of an image is not instantaneous, but is a process of
accumulating information. "It is striking to observe that emotion exerts pervasive
interference effects on these proactive processes during fairly early stages of
accumulation of perceptual evidence (when the retinal input is still minimal or
impoverished)...suggesting that the affective properties of the visual input are
intrinsically embedded in the predictions generated during the rapid extraction of its
gist" (p. 93).
Todd, R. M., Talmi, D., Schmitz, T. W., Susskind, J., & Anderson, A. K. (2012). Psychophysical and
neural evidence for emotion-enhanced perceptual vividness. The Journal of
Neuroscience, 32(33), 11201-11212.
"Highly emotional events are associated with vivid 'flashbulb' memories. Here we
examine whether the flashbulb metaphor characterizes a previously unknown emotionenhanced vividness (EEV) during initial perceptual experience....These findings indicate
that the metaphorical vivid light surrounding emotional memories is embodied directly
in perceptual cortices during initial experience, supported by cortico-limbic
interactions" (p. 11201).
Tomlinson, B., & Masuhara, H. (2009). Playing to Learn: A Review of Physical Games in Second
Language Acquisition. Simulation & Gaming, 40(5), 645-668. doi:
10.1177/1046878109339969
"The basic principle of [Total Physical Response, or TPR] is that linking physical activity
to comprehensible input deepens the learning in an environment that is relaxed and
nonthreatening....[Tomlinson developed TPR Plus, which seems] to report high student
motivation, enjoyment, and achievement" (p. 647).
“This language is totally contextualized by the game and made comprehensible through
actually playing the game (and observing others playing it) rather than just being told
about it. The learners are typically… positive, engaged, and relaxed (in the sense of not
worrying about the language). The language the students experience in the game is
salient and meaningful, and it is repeated many times in different ways. Also the
processing of the language is potentially deep (in the sense that it is semantically
focused, and it is meaningful to the learners)" (pp. 649-650).
Waring, J. D., & Kensinger, E. A. (2011). How emotion leads to selective memory: neuroimaging
evidence. Neuropsychologia, 49(7), 1831-1842.
"Often memory for emotionally arousing items is enhanced relative to neutral items
within complex visual scenes, but this enhancement can come at the expense of memory
for peripheral background information. This ‘trade-off’ effect has been elicited by a
range of stimulus valence and arousal levels, yet the magnitude of the effect has been
shown to vary with these factors. Using fMRI, this study investigated the neural
mechanisms underlying this selective memory for emotional scenes. Further, we
examined how these processes are affected by stimulus dimensions of arousal and
valence. The trade-off effect in memory occurred for low to high arousal positive and
negative scenes. There was a core emotional memory network associated with the
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trade-off among all the emotional scene types, however, there were additional regions
that were uniquely associated with the trade-off for each individual scene type. These
results suggest that there is a common network of regions associated with the
emotional memory trade-off effect, but that valence and arousal also independently
affect the neural activity underlying the effect" (p. 1831).
Yegiyan, N. S. & Yonelinas, A. P. (2011). Encoding details: Positive emotion leads to memory
broadening. Cognition & Emotion, 25(7), 1255-1262. doi:
10.1080/02699931.2010.540821
"Results indicated that increases in both positive and negative stimulus arousal levels
led to gradual increases in memory for the central aspects of the photos. In contrast,
negative arousal first increased then decreased memory for peripheral detail as arousal
levels increased, whereas positive arousal led to a continuous increase in memory for
peripheral details. Thus, arousing negative materials lead to memory narrowing,
whereas arousing positive materials can lead to memory broadening" (p. 1255).
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