Memory for emotional pictures and levels of processing

Memory for emotional pictures and levels of processing. Memory for emotional stimuli is higher than for neutral stimuli. Although this is a well established phenomenon, its mechanism is not clear. Christianson (1992) made a proposal concerning such a mechanism. He suggested that the higher retention of emotional stimuli over neutral ones could be due to some mechanism not involving deliberate attention. The present work has been aimed to investigate such a proposal by testing memory for emotional and neutral pictures and orienting subjects' attention during encoding to either the emotional properties of the stimuli or to their physical appearance. The results suggest that the emotional properties of the stimuli can have an effect on their retention even when subject's attention during encoding has not been deliberately directed to such properties.