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

the positive objects, these could have been more quickly processed and
successfully encoded than the negative objects, attention could then have been
released from the positive objects, leaving sufficient time to encode the details
of the background of the scene and thus avoid any impairment to memory.
Note, however, there was no support for this in average fixation durations.
There is no single theory of the effects of emotion on memory which
can explain the pattern of results found in this study. Our results are not fully
consistent with Kensinger’s (2007a) proposal of a valence account of emotion,
nor with an alternative theory which proposes that it is the arousing nature of
emotional stimuli, rather than their positive or negative valence, which is
responsible for these emotional effects (e.g. Mather, 2007; Vogt et al., 2008).
Vogt et al. (2008) argued for a predominant effect of emotional arousal, over
valence, with slower disengagement of spatial attention for stimuli high in
arousal, than low in arousal, regardless of valence. Mather (2007) argued for
the importance of emotional arousal and proposed a specific theory to explain
how visual memory specificity may be enhanced for arousing objects. Mather
(2007) argued that emotionally arousing objects attract attention, which
enhances binding of the objects’ constituent features and then leads to
interference in working memory making it more difficult to maintain other
bound representations. This interference leads to an impairment (or no effect)
on associations between the objects and other distinct objects or background
contextual information, and explains the central-peripheral trade-offs found
with emotionally arousing stimuli. According to Vogt et al. (2008) and Mather
(2007) we would have expected to find enhancement for details of both
positive and negative emotionally arousing central objects and this would lead
180