title: Memory for emotional words: The role of semantic relatedness, encoding task and affective valence.
abstract: Emotional stimuli have been repeatedly demonstrated to be better remembered than neutral ones. The aim of the present study was to test whether this advantage in memory is mainly produced by the affective content of the stimuli or it can be rather accounted for by factors such as semantic relatedness or type of encoding task. The valence of the stimuli (positive, negative and neutral words that could be either semantically related or unrelated) as well as the type of encoding task (focused on either familiarity or emotionality) was manipulated. The results revealed an advantage in memory for emotional words (either positive or negative) regardless of semantic relatedness. Importantly, this advantage was modulated by the encoding task, as it was reliable only in the task which focused on emotionality. These findings suggest that congruity with the dimension attended at encoding might contribute to the superiority in memory for emotional words, thus offering us a more complex picture of the underlying mechanisms behind the advantage for emotional information in memory.
authors.affiliation: a Research Center for Behavior Assessment and Department of Psychology , Rovira i Virgili University , Tarragona , Spain.
authors.forename: Pilar
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ferré
authors.affiliation: b Cognitive Processes & Behavior Research Group, Department of Social Psychology, Basic Psychology and Methodology , University of Santiago de Compostela , Santiago de Compostela , Spain.
authors.forename: Isabel
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Fraga
authors.affiliation: b Cognitive Processes & Behavior Research Group, Department of Social Psychology, Basic Psychology and Methodology , University of Santiago de Compostela , Santiago de Compostela , Spain.|c Human Cognition Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology , University of Minho , Braga , Portugal.
authors.forename: Montserrat
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Comesaña
authors.affiliation: a Research Center for Behavior Assessment and Department of Psychology , Rovira i Virgili University , Tarragona , Spain.|d deceased.
authors.forename: Rosa
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sánchez-Casas
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D001143:Arousal; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Encoding tasks; Memory; Negative words; Positive words; Semantic relatedness