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

the experiment and these clearly show that positive stimuli were not only
higher in valence, but also in approach motivation (see meta-analysis Section
5.2, Chapter 5).
The enhancement of memory for details of positive objects provides
evidence against arguments that positive emotion leads to more gist-based
processing (Bless et al., 1996; Levine & Bluck, 2004; Storbeck & Clore, 2005)
as this would not predict an enhancement in memory for details. It also
provides evidence against arguments that response bias is responsible for any
effects found with positive emotion (e.g. Dougal & Rotello, 2007). There are
previous findings with which an enhancement of memory by positive emotion
is consistent. These include findings of a general enhancement of memory for
positive stimuli (Dewhurst & Parry, 2000; Kern et al., 2005; Talmi et al., 2007)
and proponents of the theory that emotional arousal, not valence, is the critical
factor in emotions’ effects on memory would be likely to predict an
enhancement of memory for positive emotionally arousing stimuli (Mather,
2007; Vogt et al., 2008).
To our knowledge there are no studies of central-peripheral trade-offs
in recognition memory for positive stimuli. There is, however, one recent
article comparing the descriptions of recalled negative and positive emotional
autobiographical events. Talarico, Berntsen & Rubin (2009) found that
descriptions of negative life events contained a reduced number of peripheral
details to those of positive life events. It is not possible to objectively judge the
accuracy of recalled memories of personal life events but these findings are
consistent with our finding of impaired memory for peripheral details for
scenes with a negative object compared to scenes with a positive object. The
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