Investigating the replicability and boundary conditions of the mnemonic advantage for disgust

ABSTRACT Research has demonstrated that people remember emotional information better than neutral information. However, such research has almost exclusively defined emotion in terms of valence and arousal. Discrete emotions may affect memory above and beyond such dimensions, with recent research indicating that disgusting information is better remembered than frightening information. We initially sought to determine whether participants are sensitive to the effects of discrete emotions when predicting their future memory performance. Participants in Experiment 1 were more confident in their memory for emotional (both frightening and disgusting) images relative to neutral images, but confidence did not differ between frightening and disgusting images. However, because we did not replicate the mnemonic advantage of disgust, subsequent experiments were concerned with testing the replicability of this effect. Because metamemorial judgments sometimes eliminate memory effects, participants in Experiment 2 did not make such judgments. Even so, the effect did not replicate. The disgust advantage was ultimately replicated in Experiment 3, where participants completed a secondary task at encoding. The disgust advantage is replicable but appears less robust than previously recognised. A single-paper meta-analysis indicated that the effect is more likely under divided attention, perhaps because the mechanisms which mediate disgust-memory are relatively automatic.

摘要 研究表明，人们对情感信息的记忆优于对中性信息的记忆。然而，此类研究几乎完全是从效价和唤醒度方面来定义情感的。离散的情感可能在这些维度之外还会影响记忆，近期研究表明，令人厌恶的信息比令人恐惧的信息更容易被记住。我们最初试图确定参与者在预测自己未来的记忆表现时是否对离散情感的影响敏感。实验1的参与者对情感（包括恐惧和厌恶）图像的记忆比中性图像更有信心，但对恐惧和厌恶图像的信心没有差异。然而，由于我们没有重复厌恶的记忆优势，后续实验关注的是测试这种效应的可重复性。因为元记忆判断有时会消除记忆效应，实验2的参与者没有做出此类判断。即便如此，该效应也没有重复出现。厌恶优势最终在实验3中得到重复，在该实验中参与者在编码时完成了一项次要任务。厌恶优势是可重复的，但似乎不如之前所认为的那样稳健。一项单篇论文的元分析表明，在注意力分散的情况下这种效应更有可能出现，也许是因为介导厌恶 - 记忆的机制相对是自动的。