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

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difference between scenes with a negative or positive object [F(1,17) = 0.42, p =<br />

.52].<br />

Section 4.4. Discussion<br />

We again found an enhancement of specific recognition for both<br />

positive and negative objects with impairment in backgrounds only for those<br />

scenes with a negative object. The findings with general recognition were the<br />

same as for Experiment 6; no significant emotional enhancement in general<br />

recognition of objects but impairment in memory for backgrounds of scenes<br />

with a negative object. The memory results for this experiment demonstrated a<br />

similar pattern of results to those from Experiment 6 with a new set of<br />

participants. There were some differences in the exact values but the pattern of<br />

main effects and interactions were comparable between the two experiments.<br />

We found support for the proposal that attention at encoding is<br />

important for the negative emotional enhancement of memory with a greater<br />

number of fixations and longer gaze durations on the negative object, than<br />

positive object, in scenes with a neutral background. The similar average<br />

fixation duration for emotional and neutral objects suggested that rather than<br />

negative objects requiring more complex processing, participants chose to<br />

explore the negative objects in scenes with more fixations than the neutral or<br />

positive objects. If negative objects were more complex to process then we<br />

would have expected to find longer average fixation durations for negative than<br />

neutral or positive objects, which we did not. The finding of significantly<br />

shorter average fixation duration for backgrounds of scenes with a neutral<br />

object appears to be an anomaly in the data as we have no explanation for why<br />

173

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