| Poster | Poster Session 05 Program Schedule
02/15/2024
02:30 pm - 03:45 pm
Room: Shubert Complex (Posters 1-60)
Poster Session 05: Neuropsychiatry | Addiction/Dependence | Stress/Coping | Emotional/Social Processes
Final Abstract #49
The Black Sheep of the Emotional Family: Disgust Does Not Improve Associative Memory Binding
Davin Iverson, University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada
Renée Biss, University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada
Category: Emotional and Social Processes
Keyword 1: emotional processes
Keyword 2: memory: normal
Keyword 3: facial affect
Objective:
At the level of the brain, it is known that emotional content receives unique, additional processing compared to neutral episodic events, influencing our ability to accurately recall such experiences. A common experimental approach in this area has been to investigate how emotion impacts our ability to remember single items, with results typically showing that emotional, and especially negative items, are better remembered compared to neutral ones. In contrast, when people are required to link multiple individual items together, a process known as associative memory, negative emotional content often worsens, while positive content tends to improve associative memory. Research on discrete emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness, fear, disgust) suggests that disgust can produce unique results in tests of memory, being better remembered in item memory tests even compared to other negative emotions. However, it remains unclear whether this unique impact of disgust would also be seen on measures assessing associative memory. In this study we explored whether the “disgust-advantage” seen in tests of item memory is also observed in tests of associative memory, in which negative content typically worsens performance.
Participants and Methods:
116 undergraduate students were tested on their item and associative memory for face-name pairs depicting five discrete emotions (i.e., happiness, fear, disgust, sadness, and neutral affect). Participants were shown a total of 40 emotional faces in the encoding task, which were paired with 40 names. After a brief delay, item memory was tested using an Old/New recognition task, in which 80 faces (40 old and 40 new) were randomly presented. Associative memory was then tested by cueing participants with each of the faces that they correctly identified from the Old/New task and having them enter the name they believed was originally paired with each face. Item and associative memory performance was independently analyzed at the overall level, as well as for each emotion category.
Results:
Contrary to predictions, emotional faces were not better recognized than neutral faces in the item memory task; instead, neutral and happy faces were more likely to be correctly recognized than fearful or disgusted faces. Similar results were found on the associative memory measure. After being cued by a face, names paired with happy and neutral faces were more likely to be remembered than names paired with disgusted faces.
Conclusions:
These results suggest that using faces as emotional items produces results more similar to associative than to typical item memory findings. In addition, the reported salience of disgust in tests of item memory did not translate to measures of associative memory. The interplay between emotional facial stimuli and different forms of memory should be explored further, as it is apparent that faces differ in unique ways from other common stimuli such as words. Future work will use eye tracking technology to examine how faces representing different emotions influence participants’ attention at encoding, potentially providing insight into the mechanisms underpinning the observed downstream impacts on memory.
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