Abstract
Previous studies in which the effects of emotional valence on old-new discrimination and source memory have been examined have yielded highly inconsistent results. Here, we present two experiments showing that old-new face discrimination was not affected by whether a face was associated with disgusting, pleasant, or neutral behavior. In contrast, source memory for faces associated with disgusting behavior (i.e., memory for the disgusting context in which the face was encountered) was consistently better than source memory for other types of faces. This data pattern replicates the findings of studies in which descriptions of cheating, neutral, and trustworthy behavior were used, which findings were previously ascribed to a highly specific cheater detection module. The present results suggest that the enhanced source memory for faces of cheaters is due to a more general source memory advantage for faces associated with negative or threatening contexts that may be instrumental in avoiding the negative consequences of encounters with persons associated with negative or threatening behaviors.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Anderson, L., & Shimamura, A. P. (2005). Influences of emotion on context memory while viewing film clips. American Journal of Psychology, 118, 323–337.
Axelrod, R., & Hamilton, W. D. (1981). The evolution of cooperation. Science, 211, 1390–1396.
Barclay, P. (2008). Enhanced recognition of defectors depends on their rarity. Cognition, 107, 817–828.
Barclay, P., & Lalumi′ere, M. L. (2006). Do people differentially remember cheaters? Human Nature, 17, 98–113.
Batchelder, W. H., & Riefer, D. M. (1990). Multinomial processing models of source monitoring. Psychological Review, 97, 548–564.
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5, 323–370.
Bayen, U. J., Murnane, K., & Erdfelder, E. (1996). Source discrimination, item detection, and multinomial models of source monitoring. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 22, 197–215.
Bayen, U. J., Nakamura, G. V., Dupuis, S. E., & Yang, C.-L. (2000). The use of schematic knowledge about sources in source monitoring. Memory & Cognition, 28, 480–500.
Bell, R., Buchner, A., & Mund, I. (2008). Age-related differences in irrelevant-speech effects. Psychology & Aging, 23, 377–391.
Bless, H., Clore, G. L., Schwarz, N., Golisano, V., Rabe, C., & Wolk, M. (1996). Mood and the use of scripts: Does a happy mood really lead to mindlessness? Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 71, 665–679.
Bless, H., & Fiedler, K. (2006). Mood and the regulation of information processing and behavior. In J. P. Forgas (Ed.), Affect in social thinking and behavior (pp. 65–84). New York: Psychology Press.
Bornstein, R. F. (1989). Exposure and affect: Overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968-1987. Psychological Bulletin, 106, 265–289.
Bröder, A., & Meiser, T. (2007). Measuring source memory. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 215, 52–60.
Buchner, A., Bell, R., Mehl, B., & Musch, J. (2009). No enhanced recrecognition memory, but better source memory for faces of cheaters. Evolution & Human Behavior, 30, 212–224.
Buchner, A., Mehl, B., Rothermund, K., & Wentura, D. (2006). Artificially induced valence of distractor words increases the effects of irrelevant speech on serial recall. Memory & Cognition, 34, 1055–1062.
Buchner, A., Rothermund, K., Wentura, D., & Mehl, B. (2004). Valence of distractor words increases the effects of irrelevant speech on serial recall. Memory & Cognition, 32, 722–731.
Carlisle, E., & Shafir, E. (2005). Questioning the cheater-detection hypothesis: New studies with the selection task. Thinking & Reasoning, 11, 97–122.
Chiappe, D., Brown, A., Dow, B., Koontz, J., Rodriguez, M., & Mc-Culloch, K. (2004). Cheaters are looked at longer and remembered better than cooperators in social exchange situations. Evolutionary Psychology, 2, 108–120.
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cook, G. I., Hicks, J. L., & Marsh, R. L. (2007). Source monitoring is not always enhanced for valenced material. Memory & Cognition, 35, 222–230.
Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. Cognition, 31, 187–276.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 163–228). New York: Oxford University Press.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2005). Neurocognitive adaptations designed for social exchange. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 584–627). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Curtis, V., Aunger, R., & Rabie, T. (2004). Evidence that disgust evolved to protect from risk of disease. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 271(Suppl. 4), S131-S133.
D’Argembeau, A., & Van der Linden, M. (2004). Influence of affective meaning on memory for contextual information. Emotion, 4, 173–188.
De Bruin, E. N. M., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (1999). Impression formation and cooperative behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology, 29, 305–328.
Doerksen, S., & Shimamura, A. P. (2001). Source memory enhancement for emotional words. Emotion, 1, 5–11.
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A.-G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G∗Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 175–191.
Fessler, D. M. T., Eng, S. J., & Navarrete, C. D. (2005). Elevated disgust sensitivity in the first trimester of pregnancy: Evidence supporting the compensatory prophylaxis hypothesis. Evolution & Human Behavior, 26, 344–351.
Fiddick, L., & Rutherford, M. D. (2006). Looking for loss in all the wrong places: Loss avoidance does not explain cheater detection. Evolution & Human Behavior, 27, 417–432.
Glanzer, M., Adams, J. K., Iverson, G. J., & Kim, K. (1993). The regularities of recognition memory. Psychological Review, 100, 546–567.
Holm, S. (1979). A simple sequentially rejective multiple test procedure. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 6, 65–70.
Horstmann, G., & Bauland, A. (2006). Search asymmetries with real faces: Testing the anger-superiority effect. Emotion, 6, 193–207.
Johnson, M. K., Nolde, S. F., & De Leonardis, D. M. (1996). Emotional focus and source monitoring. Journal of Memory & Language, 35, 135–156.
Kensinger, E. A. (2007). Negative emotion enhances memory accuracy: Behavioral and neuroimaging evidence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 213–218.
Kensinger, E. A., & Corkin, S. (2003). Memory enhancement for emotional words: Are emotional words more vividly remembered than neutral words? Memory & Cognition, 31, 1169–1180.
Kensinger, E. A., O’Brien, J. L., Swanberg, K., Garoff-Eaton, R. J., & Schacter, D. L. (2007). The effects of emotional content on reality-monitoring performance in young and older adults. Psychology & Aging, 22, 752–764.
Kensinger, E. A., Piguet, O., Krendl, A. C., & Corkin, S. (2005). Memory for contextual details: Effects of emotion and aging. Psychology & Aging, 20, 241–250.
Kensinger, E. A., & Schacter, D. L. (2006). Amygdala activity is associated with the successful encoding of item, but not source, information for positive and negative stimuli. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 2564–2570.
Mather, M. (2007). Emotional arousal and memory binding: An objectbased framework. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2, 33–52.
Mather, M., Mitchell, K. J., Raye, C. L., Novak, D. L., Greene, E. J., & Johnson, M. K. (2006). Emotional arousal can impair feature binding in working memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 614–625.
Mather, M., & Nesmith, K. (2008). Arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures. Journal of Memory & Language, 58, 449–464.
Mealey, L., Daood, C., & Krage, M. (1996). Enhanced memory for faces of cheaters. Ethology & Sociobiology, 17, 119–128.
Mehl, B., & Buchner, A. (2008). No enhanced memory for faces of cheaters. Evolution & Human Behavior, 29, 35–41.
Murnane, K., & Bayen, U. J. (1998). Measuring memory for source: Some theoretical assumptions and technical limitations. Memory & Cognition, 26, 674–677.
Nairne, J. S., & Pandeirada, J. N. S. (2008a). Adaptive memory: Is survival processing special? Journal of Memory & Language, 59, 377–385.
Nairne, J. S., & Pandeirada, J. N. S. (2008b). Adaptive memory: Remembering with a stone-age brain. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 239–243.
Nairne, J. S., Pandeirada, J. N. S., & Thompson, S. R. (2008). Adaptive memory: The comparative value of survival processing. Psychological Science, 19, 176–180.
Nairne, J. S., Thompson, S. R., & Pandeirada, J. N. S. (2007). Adaptive memory: Survival processing enhances retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 33, 263–273.
Ochsner, K. N. (2000). Are affective events richly recollected or simply familiar? The experience and process of recognizing feelings past. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 242–261.
Oda, R. (1997). Biased face recognition in the prisoner’s dilemma game. Evolution & Human Behavior, 18, 309–315.
Öhman, A., Lundqvist, D., & Esteves, F. (2001). The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 80, 381–396.
Peeters, G., & Czapinski, J. (1990). Positive-negative asymmetry in evaluations: The distinction between affective and informational negativity effects. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European review of social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 33–60). Chichester, U.K.: Wiley.
Pratto, F., & John, O. P. (1991). Automatic vigilance: The attentiongrabbing power of negative social information. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 61, 380–391.
Rossmann, P. (1984). On the forgetting of word associations: Parkin et al. reconsidered. Psychological Research, 45, 377–388.
Rothbart, M., & Park, B. (1986). On the confirmability and disconfirmability of trait concepts. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 50, 131–142.
Rothkegel, R. (1999). AppleTree: A multinomial processing tree modeling program for Macintosh computers. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 31, 696–700.
Rozin, P., & Fallon, A. E. (1987). A perspective on disgust. Psychological Review, 94, 23–41.
Schienle, A., Walter, B., Stark, R., & Vaitl, D. (2002). Ein Fragebogen zur Erfassung der Ekelempfindlichkeit (FEE) [A questionnaire for the assessment of disgust sensitivity]. Zeitschrift für Klinische Psychologie und Psychotherapie: Forschung und Praxis, 31, 110–120.
Schmidt, S. R. (1991). Can we have a distinctive theory of memory? Memory & Cognition, 19, 523–542.
Skowronski, J. J., & Carlston, D. E. (1989). Negativity and extremity biases in impression formation: A review of explanations. Psychological Bulletin, 105, 131–142.
Smith, A. P. R., Dolan, R. J., & Rugg, M. D. (2004). Event-related potential correlates of the retrieval of emotional and nonemotional context. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 760–775.
Snodgrass, J. G., & Corwin, J. (1988). Pragmatics of measuring recognition memory: Applications to dementia and amnesia. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 117, 34–50.
Spaniol, J., & Bayen, U. J. (2002). When is schematic knowledge used in source monitoring? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 28, 631–651.
Stahl, C., & Klauer, K. C. (2007). HMMTree: A computer program for latent-class hierarchical multinomial processing tree models. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 267–273.
Toronchuk, J. A., & Ellis, G. F. R. (2007). Disgust: Sensory affect or primary emotional system? Cognition & Emotion, 21, 1799–1818.
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57.
Wason, P. C. (1968). Reasoning about a rule. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 273–281.
Wentura, D., Rothermund, K., & Bak, P. (2000). Automatic vigilance: The attention-grabbing power of approach- and avoidancerelated social information. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 78, 1024–1037.
Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 9, 1–27.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Additional information
The research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Bu 945/7-1).
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bell, R., Buchner, A. Valence modulates source memory for faces. Memory & Cognition 38, 29–41 (2010). https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.1.29
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.1.29