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

participant and the artificial production of emotions may make them
qualitatively different to emotions experienced in real life events. One way to
overcome this limitation could be to induce emotions by asking participants to
recall emotional events from their own life (e.g. Berntsen, 2002). This would
ensure that the emotions are ecologically valid, however, with this type of
emotion induction it can be difficult to quantify the emotions experienced by
different participants and ensure participants experience similar emotions.
One other limitation of research in this thesis could be from the study of
experimentally produced memories. It is possible that memories of
autobiographical life events are affected in a different way by emotion than the
artificial stimuli used in this thesis, although, this artificiality was limited by
the use of photographs of complex everyday visual scenes, in comparison to
the abstract stimuli used in some research. Similar to the limitations of using
individual experiences to elicit emotion, with autobiographical memories it can
be difficult to differentiate between differences in the actual life events
experienced as opposed to participants’ memories of these events.
Nevertheless, the examination of autobiographical memories of negative and
positive life events has led to a pattern of findings of reduced memory for
peripheral aspects of a negative life event (e.g. Talarico et al, 2009) that is
similar to the findings of a central-peripheral trade-off with negative
experimental stimuli.
The paradigms used in this thesis have been artificial experimental
representations of how emotion may effect memory for actual life events,
nevertheless, the findings may still apply to real world experiences. For
example, the finding of negative and positive emotional enhancement of
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