role of attention and organization in emotional memory enhancement.
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 155
ISBN-13: 9780494220313
Description: Emotionally arousing events are remembered better than neutral events, an effect termed Emotionally Enhanced Memory (EEM). The 'modulation model' explains prolonged EEM through the direct influence emotion has on modulating neurobiological processes involved in the consolidation of memory traces. Since the postulated neurobiological consolidation processes take hours to complete, a strict modulation model does not account for EEM when memory is tested at relatively short delays. The cognitive mediation hypothesis suggests that an emotion leads to EEM indirectly, through the mediation of cognitive factors, an effect that can manifest immediately after study. Emotional stimuli are associated with allocation of more attentional resources as well as better organization (semantic relatedness) at encoding. Attention and organization are known to enhance memory on their own, independent of emotionality. The present work examined the role of attention and organization in immediate EEM to determine whether the effects of emotion on memory are mediated through them.The first two experiments provided a stringent test of the hypothesis that EEM is mediated through attention by means of mediator analysis. Results showed that while recall of positively-arousing stimuli was mediated by attention, memory for negatively-arousing stimuli was not, but instead was directly predicted by emotional arousal. Following experiments thus focused on negative emotion. Experiments 3 and 4 provided further empirical support for the claim that the effect of emotion on recall is independent of attention by examining memory for equally-attended emotional and neutral items. Experiment 5 ruled out differential distinctiveness as accounting for the effects of emotion on attention and memory. Experiments 1-5 showed that organization accounts for part, but not all, of EEM. Experiment 6 suggested that recollection was enhanced directly by emotion, but that familiarity might be attentionally-mediated. Experiment 7 examined the neural substrate that underlies EEM with functional magnetic resonance imaging, and showed that in contrast with the mediation hypothesis, none of the regions activated by attention accounted for EEM. Instead, EEM was correlated with activation in the amygdala, a region associated with the direct modulation account. A combined model of modulation and mediation is used to account for the data.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-01, Section: B, page: 0646.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006.

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