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

failure to retrieve episodic memories, rather than a failure in the initial
encoding of these memories (Williams et al., 2007). Mathews, Richards &
Eysenck (1989) found that when clinically anxious people, in comparison to
controls, listened to and wrote down homophones the former were more likely
to write down the threatening meaning, rather than neutral meaning, of the
homophone. The interpretive bias that operates with these anxiety-prone
individuals in making them preferentially aware of the more threatening
meaning of such events (Mathews et al., 1989) may be a function of a different
retrieval strategy to that used by non-anxious individuals.
Different patterns of emotional enhancement have been found when
different tasks are used to measure memory and this may indicate that different
tasks encourage participants to retrieve memories in different ways. Better
memory for positive than negative trait information was found when
information was encoded with reference to the self, but not with reference to
another person, when memory was measured by free-recall but not when it was
measured by recognition (D'Argembeau, Comblain, & Van der Linden 2005).
D’Argembeau et al. (2005) suggested retrieval processes may explain some
part of their findings as the provision of cues at the time of retrieval in the
recognition task seemed to eradicate the emotional differences found with free
recall.
Neuropsychological studies using fMRI have shown greater and
differential activity with successful recognition of emotional, compared to
neutral items, both at the time of encoding, and at the time of retrieval (Dolcos,
LaBar, & Cabeza, 2004, 2005). These findings have also been shown to hold
when examining the retrieval of neutral stimuli encoded in an emotional
36