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

The possibility of a response bias towards giving an incorrect ‘same’
response to emotional, rather than neutral, items was checked by analysing
responses to new items, which had not been seen before the recognition test.
Analyses using 3 (emotion) x 3 (response type) ANOVAs were carried out
separately for recognition of the objects and backgrounds and found no
evidence for such a response bias.
Section 3.4. Discussion
An enhancement of specific recognition was found for both positive
and negative objects with impairment for backgrounds only for scenes with a
negative object. There was no emotional enhancement for memory of objects
in general recognition 3 , although an impairment in memory for backgrounds
with negative objects did approach significance, suggesting the central-
peripheral trade-off is more pronounced when measuring specific, than general,
recognition. The central-peripheral trade-off in specific recognition with
negative emotion suggests that attention narrowing onto the negative objects
may explain this enhancement of specific recognition of negative objects.
Conversely, the lack of central-peripheral trade-off with positive emotion
suggests that factors other than attentional focus at the time of encoding are
needed to explain this effect.
These findings of negative and positive emotional enhancement for the
memory of objects presented on a neutral background are similar to those of
Experiment 5 when objects were presented in isolation. A shorter time delay
3 There was a near ceiling effect in general recognition of objects which may have prevented
any emotional enhancement of this measure from being found. The general recognition of
backgrounds was much lower than of objects and therefore allowed emotional influences to be
found.
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