Manipulations of the emotional valence of stimuli between encoding and retieval: implications for memory

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There is growing evidence that, under certain conditions, both explicit and implicit memory biases occur for emotionally arousing information. That is, participants who encode some information that is emotionally arousing along with identical amounts of emotionally neutral information will later retrieve significantly more of the emotionally arousing than neutral information through a variety of explicit and implicit memory paradigms. Research on false memories has demonstrated that information provided between encoding and retrieval can influence the accuracy of retrieval, however few studies have examined whether altering the emotional valence of encoded information prior to retrieval will influence what information is retrieved. The current application proposes to address questions of how retrieval is affected when the to-be-remembered information is neutral at encoding but made to be emotionally arousing at a later point in time. Our aim is to determine whether or not a memory bias for emotionally arousing information can be detected when the information is neutral at encoding. Additional studies will investigate this concept using a variety of other methodologies involving variations in the delays between encoding, the provision of new information, and retrieval; whereas others will vary the emotional valence to determine whether or not this effect is related only to negative emotions or to stimuli associated with any provoked emotion. This work will have important implications for our understanding of how the emotional (and/or neutral) nature of information affects its subsequent retrieval and for how processes associated with this are affected by the timing of the generation of emotional arousal associated with the stimuli. If our hypotheses are supported, this could provide a mechanism through which to selectively enhance (or reduce) memory for information already learned. Additional implications of this work involve the nature of memory associated with emotional problems that develop over time or after a delay.