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

een found with emotional events. Emotion has been shown to enhance
memory for the gist of an event at the expense of memory for details of the
event (Adolphs, Tranel, & Buchanan, 2005; though cf. Kensinger et al., 2006).
The experimental findings of studies which failed to find an emotional
enhancement of memory may be explained by considering how the task
affected processing style at retrieval. In a task where participants were asked to
recall targeted perceptual aspects of experimental stimuli (i.e. in which half of
an experimental list stimulus pictures were presented) the recall of emotional
stimuli was worse than of neutral stimuli (Aupee, 2007). This may be because
the task induced participants to use an analytic processing style at retrieval and
may suggest that in some cases analytic processing may not just block any
emotional enhancements of memory but actually reverse them.
This study tests the hypothesis that different strategies in the retrieval of
emotional stimuli contribute to the emotional enhancement of memory. If
people spontaneously use a nonanalytic processing strategy when attempting to
recognise emotional material then we would expect to see an advantage for
emotional material, over neutral, in traditional recognition tasks. However, we
would expect any emotional enhancement effects to disappear in an analytic
processing strategy task as this would prevent participants from using the
successful strategy that we propose normally gives an advantage with
emotional material. There is one additional issue of retrieval style in
recognition tests that we wish to explore. In some recent research participants
were asked to perform a recognition task and then subsequently make a
Remember / Know / Guess (RKG) judgement (e.g. Dahl, Johansson, &
Allwood, 2006; Dewhurst & Parry, 2000; Dougal & Rotello, 2007). It is
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