Assessing Hedonic Bias in Emotional Scene Memory

Across studies, memory for emotional events has shown a positivity bias, a negativity bias, and/or an arousal bias, and different types of memory biases have been reported in patients diagnosed with anxiety and mood disorders. Here, we investigated hedonic bias in memory for emotionally evocative scenes in a large sample (n = 625) of healthy young adults, in order to provide normative data on effects of pleasure, arousal, and content on immediate free recall that could facilitate future clinical investigations. Participants first viewed and rated a set of 60 pictures, followed by an unexpected memory test. Across participants, memory data was obtained for 360 different pictures, which served as the unit of analysis. There was neither a systematic positivity nor negativity bias in free recall of emotionally arousing scenes. Rather, memory was enhanced for scenes rated as highly arousing, whether pleasant or unpleasant, with those depicting romantic/sexual love and death/violence remembered equally well, and significantly better than other hedonic contents. Gender differences were not strong. Taken together, these data provide a basic science foundation for assessing hedonic bias in clinical populations.