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Contributions of Arousal, Attention, Distinctiveness, and Semantic Relatedness to Enhanced Emotional Memory: An Event-Related Potential and Electrocardiogram Study

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Abstract

Enhanced emotional memory (EEM) describes memory benefits for emotional items, traditionally attributed to impacts of arousal at encoding; however, attention, semantic relatedness, and distinctiveness likely also contribute in various ways. The current study manipulated arousal, semantic relatedness, and distinctiveness while recording changes in event-related potentials and heart rate during memory encoding. Trials were classified as remembered or forgotten by immediate recall performance. Negative images were remembered significantly better than neutral, and related neutral images were remembered significantly better than unrelated neutral images. Higher P300 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes were associated with memory for negative images as compared with related neutral images, suggesting that negative images received additional attentional processing at encoding, and that this cannot be accounted for only by the inherent relatedness of negative stimuli. No encoding benefits were found for related neutral images though they were better remembered than unrelated neutral images, indicating retrieval dynamics impacted memory. When image types were intermixed, greater heart rate changes occurred, and negative and unrelated neutral images received increased elaborative processing as compared with related neutral images, perhaps due to the prioritization of encoding resources. These results suggest encoding and retrieval processes contribute to EEM, with emotional items benefiting additively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California at Davis, Center for Neuroscience, Sacramento, CA, USA

    Vanessa C. Zarubin

  2. Department of Psychology, Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC, USA

    Timothy K. Phillips, Eileen Robertson, Paige G. Bolton Swafford, Taylor Bunge & Katherine R. Mickley Steinmetz

  3. Department of Physics, Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC, USA

    David Aguillard & Carolyn Martsberger

Authors
  1. Vanessa C. Zarubin
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  2. Timothy K. Phillips
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  3. Eileen Robertson
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  4. Paige G. Bolton Swafford
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  5. Taylor Bunge
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  8. Katherine R. Mickley Steinmetz
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Correspondence to Katherine R. Mickley Steinmetz.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Avery Jucksch, Katherine Covington, Mariel Teigen, Margaret Roach, Savannah Patterson, Sheldon Newman, Hunter Wages, Turner Bryant, Nick Butler, Caroline Wilson, Jake Philips, and Catie Cronister for their contributions to this work and Wofford College for funding. We would also like to thank Dr. G. Andrew Mickley for comments on a previous version of this draft and Dr. Matthew Cathey for statistical guidance.

Funding Information

The authors received funding from Wofford College.

Data Availability

Data are available here https://osf.io/4kj6f/.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

This study was approved by the Wofford College Institutional Review Board and the study was performed to ethical standards as laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki.

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Informed consent was obtained from all research participants. No experiments were pre-registered. Consent to publish is given.

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Handling editor: Elizabeth Kensinger

The submitted work has not been published previously and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.

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Zarubin, V.C., Phillips, T.K., Robertson, E. et al. Contributions of Arousal, Attention, Distinctiveness, and Semantic Relatedness to Enhanced Emotional Memory: An Event-Related Potential and Electrocardiogram Study. Affec Sci 1, 172–185 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00012-y

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