Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia.
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia.
Cogn Emot. 2021 Sep;35(6):1231-1237. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2021.1936460. Epub 2021 Jun 2.
Disgust is remembered better than fear, despite both emotions being highly negative and arousing. But the mechanisms underlying this effect are not well-understood. Therefore, we compared two proposed mechanisms underlying superior memory for disgust. According to the memory consolidation mechanism, it is harder (but crucial) to remember potentially contaminating vs. threatening stimuli. Hence, disgust elicits additional memory consolidation processes to fear. According to the attention mechanism, it takes longer to establish if disgust (relative to fear) stimuli are dangerous. Hence, people pay more attention to disgust during encoding. Both mechanisms could boost memory for disgust. Ninety-eight participants encoded disgust, fear, and neutral images whilst completing a simple task to measure attention. After 10- or 45-min delay, participants freely recalled the images. We found enhanced memory for disgust relative to fear after 10- 45-min delay, but this effect was larger after 45-min. Participants paid more attention to disgust than fear images during encoding. However, mixed effect models showed increased attention did not contribute to enhanced memory for disgust. Our results therefore support the memory consolidation mechanism.
厌恶比恐惧更容易被记住，尽管这两种情绪都是高度负面和引起情绪波动的。但是，这种效应背后的机制尚不清楚。因此，我们比较了两种解释厌恶记忆优势的机制。根据记忆巩固机制，记住潜在的污染性刺激比记住威胁性刺激更难（但很关键）。因此，与恐惧相比，厌恶会引发额外的记忆巩固过程。根据注意力机制，需要更长的时间来确定厌恶（相对于恐惧）刺激是否危险。因此，在编码过程中，人们会更加关注厌恶。这两种机制都可以提高对厌恶的记忆。98 名参与者在完成一项简单任务以测量注意力的同时，对厌恶、恐惧和中性图像进行了编码。在 10 或 45 分钟的延迟后，参与者自由地回忆了这些图像。我们发现，与恐惧相比，10 到 45 分钟的延迟后，对厌恶的记忆增强了，但 45 分钟后效果更大。在编码过程中，参与者对厌恶图像的注意力比对恐惧图像的注意力更多。然而，混合效应模型表明，注意力的增加并没有对厌恶记忆的增强产生贡献。因此，我们的结果支持记忆巩固机制。
