The effect of interpersonal affect on the person memory

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This study was conducted to examine the relationships between interpersonal affect and person memories. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to examine person memory for emotional versus neutral events. Participants in the experiment were presented with a thematic series of 18 color slides. Each slide was shown for 7 sec. In the neutral condition, the 18 slides depicted one day scenes that a woman are leaving home, going to the park, reading a newspaper, entering into the theater, drinking a red can of juice, and going back to home. The critical, ninth and tenth, slides in the neutral condition depicted scenes of an opera. The slide series for the emotional condition was identical to the neutral condition with respect to slides 1-8 and 11-18. The critical slides in the emotional condition depicted the dead men's bodies bleeding heavily from head injury. Immediately after viewing the slides, the participants were given a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test on the 16 slides except for two critical slides. The results showed that the significant interaction between serial position blocks (first half or second half) and emotional arousal was observed in recognition scores.The purpose of the Experiment 2 was to investigate the effect of the first impression on delayed person memory. Participants were first given hostile or friendly descriptions of a target person to form the first impressions. Then they were asked to read the behavioral descriptions that was ambiguous regarding hospitality. About an hour later, they were asked to recall the behavioral descriptions that they have previously read. Participants who have given friendly impressions remembered more hostile behavioral descriptions than those who given hostile impressions, while there were no significant differences between the two groups in the recall of neutral descriptions.