Effects of Emotionally Valenced Objects on Associative Memory of Events

Kersten et al. (2021) revealed that participants remembered negatively valenced actions better than neutral actions, but did no better at binding negative actions with the people who performed them compared to neutral actions. We were interested in testing whether emotion only enhances memory for individual features of an event, or whether emotion can also enhance binding of certain combinations of features. In particular, we tested the effect of emotionally charged objects on the ability to remember those objects and the actions associated with them. Participants saw a series of brief videos each involving an actor performing one of two different actions on one of two objects within a specific object category (e.g., guns or piñatas), some objects neutral in valence, some positive, and some negative. Participants were later tested on their ability to distinguish old events from novel conjunctions of particular objects with the actions that had been previously performed with the other members of the same object categories. Although only marginally significant, participants appeared more able to bind objects with their associated actions when those objects held a negative charge compared to neutral objects. Additionally, participants were more sensitive to changes in actions when those actions were associated with negative objects compared to neutral or positive objects. However, false memory increased when new negative objects were presented compared to novel presentation of neutral or positive objects.