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

een found when memory is assessed by recognition (e.g. Clark-Foos &
Marsh, 2008; Talmi, Schimmack, Paterson, & Moscovitch, 2007) and by free
recall (Kern et al., 2005). Talmi et al (2007) compared memory for emotional
and neutral pictures that were encoded whilst participants concurrently
completed a divided attention task of auditory discrimination or whilst
participants could give their full attention to encoding the pictures. They found
the use of additional attention at encoding could completely account for an
emotional enhancement in memory of positive pictures. In contrast, the
enhancing effects of negative emotion on memory were found to be
independent of attention. Similarly, Clark-Foos & Marsh (2008) found that
dividing attention at encoding and during the memory test, by participants
performing a random number generation task, did not effect the negative
emotional enhancement of word recognition relative to neutral words. Again
similar results were found by Kern et al (2005) that dividing attention at the
time of encoding worsened neutral, but not negative, memories.
The patterns of findings across these studies are very similar but
differing interpretations of what they reveal about the role of attention in
emotion’s effects on memory have been given by the authors. Kern et al (2005)
interpreted their results within the two-path theory proposed by Christianson,
Loftus, Hoffman, & Loftus (1991) and argued that pre-attentive processing can
account for the emotional advantage of negative stimuli. They rejected the
second path of Christianson et al’s (1991) theory of post-stimulus elaboration
as an account of their findings, as there was no opportunity for this elaboration
to occur due to the blocking of rehearsal between the encoding of stimuli and
testing of memory. Talmi et al (2007) suggested that negative emotion has an
30