Effects of emotion on memory specificity: Memory trade-offs elicited by negative visually arousing stimuli

Two different types of trade-offs have been discussed with regard to memory for emotional information: A trade-off in the ability to remember the gist versus the visual detail of emotional information, and a trade-off in the ability to remember the central emotional elements of an event versus the nonemotional (peripheral) elements of that same event. The present study examined whether these two trade-offs interact with one another when participants study scenes that elicit an emotional response due to the inclusion of a negative visually arousing object. Participants studied scenes composed of a negative or a neutral object placed on a background. Their memory was then tested for the “gist” and visual detail of the objects and the backgrounds. The results revealed that there is a pervasive memory trade-off for central emotional versus peripheral nonemotional elements of scenes. With some encoding tasks, a trade-off for gist versus visual detail also resulted, but this trade-off occurred only when memory for the nonemotional background of a scene was assessed. There was no gist/detail trade-off for the emotional objects in a scene.