Effects of Fear vs. Anger on Recognition Memory when Emotion is Induced Before Encoding or Before Retrieval

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of specific emotions on recognition memory and to compare two approaches (i.e., valence/arousal model and motivational model) on their predictions about the emotion-memory relationship. Anger and fear were chosen as target emotions since they are both negative and highly arousing, but differ in terms of motivational tendencies. In addition, a control condition was included in which induced emotion was not negative (Exp1: calmness, Exp2: happiness). In the first experiment, emotion induction was conducted and then participants studied neutral words. After a filler task, participants were given a recognition test in which they decided whether each word was old or new. In the second experiment, emotion induction was conducted before retrieval in order to examine whether emotion effects were due to encoding or retrieval process. When emotion was induced before encoding, anger and fear did not differ in terms sensitivity (d(a)) or response bias (c(a)). When emotion was induced before retrieval, however, approach-motivated angry participants had a more liberal bias to recognize neutral words as studied, but were not more accurate than fearful participants. Together, these results suggested that both valence and motivational properties are important determinants of emotion-induced effects on recognition memory.