I believe in a thing called emotion: effects of valence on memory monitoring and performance

Abstract

It is generally well known that emotion can benefit memory; however, much less is known about how emotion influences metamemory. The current thesis examined how list composition and emotion influences individuals’ metamnemonic judgments and performance in a free recall task. Participants studied lists of words that varied in emotional valence and made immediate judgments of learning (JOLs) after each word. Valence was manipulated in a mixed-list design in Experiment 1, and a pure-list design in Experiment 2, while arousal was held constant. It was expected that valence would affect participants’ JOLs and recall performance, but only in Experiment 1. Consistent with this, emotional words were given higher JOLs and were recalled better than neutral words in Experiment 1, while no such differences were observed in Experiment 2. Results suggest that the metamnemonic effect of emotion is limited to mixed-list designs, and likely depends on participants’ beliefs about how emotion influences memory.