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

to a detriment in memory for peripheral details in both cases. The lack of a
central-peripheral trade-off in memory for positive emotional stimuli in this
experiment could be explained by the lower levels of emotional arousal for the
positive than negative stimuli. Due to the nature of stimuli used in this
experiment it was not possible to fully match the arousal levels across valence,
but it is possible that a central-peripheral trade-off in memory for positive
stimuli would appear if it were possible to match arousal levels between
negative and positive stimuli.
In conclusion, these results replicated findings of Kensinger and
colleagues (2006, 2007a, 2007b) with regards to negative objects using a new
stimulus set. However, they call into question the degree to which all such
emotional effects can be attributed to overt attentional processes at the time of
encoding and also highlight the different processes which may be responsible
for the effects of positive emotions on memory. The effects of negative
emotion appear to be associated with spatial differences in attention, as
measured by eye movements, but the effects of positive emotion do not.
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