Berger, Johanna D.

Despite extensive research into memory and violence, relatively little is known about the relationship between violent media and memory of advertised products. Research has yielded contradictory evidence ; some scholars have found a negative relationship, others a nonexistent one... This research investigated the role of emotion in the relationship between violent media and product placement memory. This study creates insight into inconclusive previous findings by providing evidence that violence influences product memory. Specifically, participants were significantly worse at remembering products placed within violent clips (e.g., free recall, cued recall, recognition. Participants' emotional responses to the violent clips also appeared to influence their memory for embedded products ; product recognition was significantly correlated with disgust, avoidance, and interest ratings.... Interestingly, stronger negative responses to the violent clips were correlated with decreased preference for the embedded products. Furthermore, the pattern of differences for product preference between target and non-target violent products varied according to negative emotional reaction. Therefore, this dissertation provides insight into the role emotion plays in the relationship between viewing violent media and product placement memory.

This experiment investigated an individual's memory of specific motion events, unique actor, intrinsic motion, and extrinsic motion combination. Intrinsic motions involve the movement of an individual's body parts in a specific manner to move around, while extrinsic motions specify a path in reference to an external object. Participants viewed video clips, each depicting an actor performing a unique extrinsic and intrinsic motion combination. One week later, they viewed a different series of retrieval video clips consisting of old (identical to encoding), extrinsic conjunction (extrinsic motion previously performed by different actor), intrinsic conjunction (intrinsic motion previously performed by different actor), and new (novel extrinsic or intrinsic motion) video clips. Participants responded "yes" to viewing the old video clips the most often, followed by conjunction video clips, and then new video clips. Furthermore, there were a greater number of "yes" event memory recognition responses for extrinsic conjunction items than intrinsic conjunction items.