| Research has indicated that emotion affects recognition memory by either increasing the hit rate and the false alarm rate (Windmann & Kutas; Windmann & Kruger, 1998), or by having selective effects on the hit rate (Maratos & Rugg, 2001). However, the recognition memory process that underlies these effects of emotion is not known. The purpose of this research was to determine the memory retrieval processes by which emotion influences recognition of items that are intrinsically emotional (Experiments 1 and 2) or that were associated with an emotional item during encoding (Experiment 3). Three response-signal associative recognition experiments are reported that demonstrate that emotion increases the proportion of "old" judgments for familiarity-based recognition judgments. In Experiment 1, emotional words were associated with a familiarity-based increase in the hit rate at short response lags. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this effect of emotion was driven by the arousal associated with the words, not their valence. And in Experiment 3, a familiarity-based effect of emotion was observed for neutral words that had been encoded in an emotional context. Taken together, these results suggest that emotion has a fast acting, low-level effect on recognition memory that is independent of the unique perceptual features of emotional items. |
