Department of Psychology, New York University, NY 10003, USA.
Emotion. 2012 Aug;12(4):834-46. doi: 10.1037/a0028003. Epub 2012 May 28.
Emotion strengthens the subjective sense of remembering. However, these confidently remembered emotional memories have not been found be more accurate for some types of contextual details. We investigated whether the subjective sense of recollecting negative stimuli is coupled with enhanced memory accuracy for three specific types of central contextual details using the remember/know paradigm and confidence ratings. Our results indicate that the subjective sense of remembering is indeed coupled with better recollection of spatial location and temporal context, but not higher memory accuracy for colored dots placed in the conceptual center of negative and neutral scenes. These findings show that the enhanced subjective recollective experience for negative stimuli reliably indicates objective recollection for spatial location and temporal context, but not for other types of details, whereas for neutral stimuli, the subjective sense of remembering is coupled with all the types of details assessed. Translating this finding to flashbulb memories, we found that, over time, more participants correctly remembered the location where they learned about the terrorist attacks on 9/11 than any other canonical feature. Likewise, participants' confidence was higher in their memory for location versus other canonical features. These findings indicate that the strong recollective experience of a negative event corresponds to an accurate memory for some kinds of contextual details but not for other kinds. This discrepancy provides further evidence that the subjective sense of remembering negative events is driven by a different mechanism than the subjective sense of remembering neutral events.
情绪增强了对记忆的主观感知。然而，对于某些类型的上下文细节，这些自信地被记住的情绪记忆并没有被发现更准确。我们使用“记得/知道”范式和置信度评分来研究当回忆负面刺激时，这种主观的回忆感是否与对三种特定类型的中心上下文细节的记忆准确性提高有关。我们的研究结果表明，当回忆负面刺激时，这种主观的回忆感确实与更好地回忆空间位置和时间背景有关，但对于放置在负面和中性场景概念中心的彩色点的记忆准确性并没有提高。这些发现表明，对于负面刺激，增强的主观回忆体验可靠地表明了对空间位置和时间背景的客观回忆，但对其他类型的细节则不然，而对于中性刺激，主观的回忆感与所有评估的细节类型有关。将这一发现转化为闪光灯记忆，我们发现，随着时间的推移，更多的参与者正确地记住了他们在何处得知 9·11 恐怖袭击的地点，而不是任何其他规范特征。同样，参与者对地点的记忆的信心比对其他规范特征的信心更高。这些发现表明，对负面事件的强烈回忆体验与对某些类型的上下文细节的准确记忆相对应，但与其他类型的细节不对应。这种差异进一步证明了对负面事件的记忆的主观感觉是由与对中性事件的记忆的主观感觉不同的机制驱动的。
