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

alternative measures of attention have been used to show a causal relationship
with emotional enhancement of memory. Talmi et al (2007) found that a
positive emotional enhancement of recognition memory was mediated by
attention by asking participants to perform a concurrent auditory discrimination
task at the time of encoding stimuli. With negative emotional stimuli there
were no effects on subsequent recognition as a result of dividing attention at
the time of encoding. This experiment did not examine memory for central or
peripheral elements separately and did not examine memory for specific visual
details so the effects of a divided attention task on recognition with the Same /
Similar / New paradigm are not clear. By considering the impact of dividing
attention at the time of encoding on the Same / Similar / New paradigm it
might be possible to draw conclusions about a causal relationship between
attention and the emotional enhancement of visual memory specificity.
One finding from this thesis that stands out is the different effects on
memory and attention from positive emotion than negative emotion. This leads
to the question of whether these differences are due to the emotion or some
other aspect of the stimuli which is different? One possibility is that many of
the positive stimuli become emotional as a result of a semantic and personal
interpretations of the stimuli, for example a birthday cake may be positive
emotionally because it brings to mind happy experiences of birthday parties.
Whereas, in contrast many of the negative stimuli are generically negative, for
example the threat of a weapon could be experienced in the same way by all
participants. This concept of the self-relevance of information has been shown
to influence memory (Gutchess, Kensinger, Yoon & Schacter, 2007) and could
be one of the ways in which positive emotional stimuli differ from negative
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