Scientific article
English

Emotion enhances the subjective feeling of remembering, despite lower accuracy for contextual details

Published inEmotion, vol. 11, no. 3, p. 553-562
Publication date2011
Abstract

Emotion strengthens the subjective experience of recollection. However, these vivid and confidently remembered emotional memories may not necessarily be more accurate. We investigated whether the subjective sense of recollection for negative stimuli is coupled with enhanced memory accuracy for contextual details using the remember/know paradigm. Our results indicate a double-dissociation between the subjective feeling of remembering, and the objective memory accuracy for details of negative and neutral scenes. "Remember" judgments were boosted for negative relative to neutral scenes. In contrast, memory for contextual details and associative binding was worse for negative compared to neutral scenes given a "remember" response. These findings show that the enhanced subjective recollective experience for negative stimuli does not reliably indicate greater objective recollection, at least of the details tested, and thus may be driven by a different mechanism than the subjective recollective experience for neutral stimuli.

Keywords
  • Affect
  • Emotions
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Judgment
  • Male
  • Mental Recall
  • Recognition
  • Psychology
  • Young Adult
Affiliation entities Not a UNIGE publication
Citation (ISO format)
RIMMELE, Ulrike et al. Emotion enhances the subjective feeling of remembering, despite lower accuracy for contextual details. In: Emotion, 2011, vol. 11, n° 3, p. 553–562. doi: 10.1037/a0024246
Main files (1)
Article (Published version)
accessLevelRestricted
Identifiers
Journal ISSN1528-3542
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