PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

stimuli, which corresponded with more successful recognition of positive
stimuli in this task. These findings were consistent with our predictions.
In this experiment we found increased accuracy of recognition for
positive stimuli in recognition when followed by a confidence judgement. The
confidence ratings for positive stimuli were higher than for negative stimuli,
regardless of accuracy of prior recognition. These findings are not consistent
with earlier research (Dahl et al., 2006) which found increased accuracy and
confidence for negative stimuli. The different findings in this experiment may
be due to the different stimulus sets used; in particular if the erotic stimuli were
used as part of the positive stimulus set in the Dahl et al. (2006) experiment
this may have led to social desirability in participants and reduced their
willingness to say that they were confident they had seen the erotic stimuli in
that experiment and to give high confidence ratings to pictures with negative
connotations. A further possibility is that the presentation of stimuli in blocked
lists of emotion, compared to the mixed lists of positive and negative stimuli of
Dahl et al. (2006) may have reduced any emotional enhancement (c.f.
Dewhurst & Parry, 2000). It is also possible that the matching of visual
characteristics between the positive, negative and neutral stimuli in this
experiment may have influenced the pattern of results.
The findings of the influence of emotion on confidence judgements are
interesting but are not theoretically relevant to the research questions addressed
in this experiment and therefore will not be discussed further.
The aim of this experiment was to manipulate the strategy that
participants used to retrieve memories by asking participants to perform
different types of memory judgements. Although there were hints in the
97