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Section 4. Chapter Discussion
The purpose of this chapter had been to examine factors other than
attentional effects at encoding which might explain the emotional enhancement
of memory for specific visual details that we have consistently found. We
considered whether associative memory, implicit memory, item distinctiveness
or surprise may be involved in this effect. We found no evidence of
involvement of associative memory, implicit memory or surprise in these
effects but did find that item distinctiveness had an influence on the attentional
effects found. With blocked emotional and neutral stimuli there was no
evidence of attentional effects on negative stimuli, nevertheless the emotional
enhancement and central-peripheral trade-off in memory remained.
These experiments have had unforeseen findings in that we found
attentional narrowing at encoding appears not to be necessary for the emotional
enhancement of specific visual details in memory. It is possible that there is a
dual route to the emotional enhancement of memory, as discussed in Chapter 4.
It has been argued that the effects of emotion on memory and attention are
independent (Talmi et al., 2007) and alternatively, it has been argued that there
may be a conscious route by which emotion enhances memory through
attention and then an unconscious route, independent of attention, which is
used when attentional resources are constrained (Clark-Foos & Marsh, 2008).
Another possibility is that the negative emotional objects automatically grab
attention as found in the emotional stroop task (e.g. Williams et al, 1997) and
this leads to the impairment in memory for the peripheral background with
negative emotion. This type of attention grabbing may not be possible to
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