Individual Differences and Arousal: Implications for the Study of Mood and Memory

Effects of Mortality Salience on Physiological Arousal

Making the inevitability of mortality salient makes people more defensive about their self-esteem and worldviews. Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence point to a mediating role of arousal in this defensive process, but evidence from physiological measurement studies is scarce and inconclusive. The present study seeks to draw a comprehensive picture of how physiological arousal develops over time in the mortality salience (MS) paradigm, and whether contemplating one's mortality actually elicits more physiological arousal than reflecting on a death-unrelated aversive control topic. In a between-subjects design, participants were asked two open questions about their mortality or about dental pain. Cardiac, respiratory, and electrodermal indicators of arousal were measured both as participants provided written answers to the questions, and during a series of resting intervals surrounding the questions. A Bayes factor analysis indicated support for the hypothesis that the MS paradigm increases physiological arousal, both while answering the two open-ended questions and afterward. Regarding the MS versus dental pain comparison, the null hypothesis of no difference was supported for most analysis segments and signals. The results indicate that the arousal elicited by MS is not different from that elicited by dental pain salience. This speaks against the idea that worldview defense following MS occurs because MS produces higher physiological arousal. Of course, this finding does not rule the importance of other forms of arousal (i.e., subjective arousal) for MS effects.

Observer Mood and Cross-Racial Recognition of Faces

Cross-race recognition (CRR) was examined for White and Black faces with participants from four racial groups: Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. Before viewing the faces, participants were asked to complete a passage to induce either a pleasant or an unpleasant mood. Each participant viewed a set of intermixed Black and White faces under each mood condition. A strong CRR effect was observed between Black and White participants, such that participants from either racial group were more likely to recognize faces of their own race and more likely to have a false alarm to faces of the other race. Latinos and Asians also were less accurate in their recognition of Black faces than Black participants, but they were no less accurate in their recognition of White faces than White participants. Face recognition was more accurate when participants from any of the racial groups were induced to be in unpleasant moods versus pleasant moods. However, mood did not interact with the CRR effect, and thus mood is unlikely to be a mediating variable for the effect.

Mood and the DRM paradigm: An investigation of the effects of valence and arousal on false memory

Recent studies regarding the effect of mood on the DRM (Deese–Roediger–McDermott) illusion have not been able to clearly establish yet whether valence or arousal is most critical in determining susceptibility to false memories, nor what the underlying processes are. In three experiments, both the valence and the level of arousal of participants' mood were manipulated. Six conditions were used: positive mood with high/low arousal, negative mood with high/low arousal, neutral mood, and a control condition. Memory was tested by means of immediate and delayed recognition and immediate free recall. The mood induction procedure was effective. For recognition memory, there was an effect of arousal on the endorsement of critical lures. Low-arousal moods elicited more false recognition than high-arousal moods, regardless of valence. Based on signal detection analyses, the effect was attributed to more liberal response criteria with low arousal, in combination with a tendency towards improved item-specific memory with high arousal.

Memory Instructions, Vocalization, Mock Crimes, and Concealed Information Tests with a Polygraph

Accuracy rates with polygraphs using concealed information tests (CITs) depend on memory for crime details. Some participants read instructions on murdering a dummy victim that specified exact crime details asked on the subsequent CIT. Others read instructions not stating details, but still requiring interaction with the exact same details for the crime. For example, the murder weapon was under four heavy boxes. Instructions stated either “… remove the 4 boxes …” or “… remove the boxes …” Thus, each group removed four boxes, but only one group was primed with the number “4” beforehand. In addition, the victim unexpectedly shouted at some participants during the crime. An innocent group was not exposed to either manipulation. Memory, detection scores, and detection rates were lower for guilty participants not primed with details. Sound affected detection scores but not memory, and there was no interaction between the two factors. Information tests are limited by how crime information is received.

Integrating experimental and observational personality research--the contributions of Hans Eysenck

A fundamental aspect of Hans Eysenck's research was his emphasis upon using all the tools available to the researcher to study personality. This included correlational, experimental, physiological, and genetic approaches. Fifty years after Cronbach's call for the reunification of the two disciplines of psychology (Cronbach, 1957) and 40 years after Eysenck's plea for experimental approaches to personality research (H. J. Eysenck, 1966), what is the status of the unification? Should personality researchers use experimental techniques? Do experimental techniques allow us to tease out causality, and are we communicating the advantages of combining experimental with multivariate correlational techniques? We review the progress made since Cronbach's and Eysenck's original papers and suggest that although it is still uncommon to find experimental studies of personality, psychology would benefit from the joint use of correlational and experimental approaches.

Toward a framework for understanding lay public's comprehension of disaster and bioterrorism information

In the last decade, we have witnessed a significant increase in disaster preparedness and crisis communication efforts. This stands in sharp contrast with paucity of research that deals with the public's comprehension of disaster information and related decision-making. The objective of this paper is to outline a theoretical and methodological framework for research on lay comprehension of crisis information. The proposed framework integrates two bodies of research: (1) cognitive science literature on comprehension and decision-making and (2) studies of the effects of anxiety on performance. The paper reviews selected works and methods from both fields, discussing how cognitive perspective could be extended to include emotional factors. We also discuss how further research integrating the proposed framework with public health communication perspective could: (1) provide insights for developing effective disaster communication and (2) inform the development of technological support for disaster communication and for education of lay people and health professionals.

How arousal modulates memory: Disentangling the effects of attention and retention

Emotion may influence memory both by altering attention and perception during encoding and by affecting memory retention. To date, studies have focused on the enhancement of memory consolidation by arousal. However, they have failed to rule out a role for attention. To specifically link memory enhancement of arousing material to modulation of memory retention, we examined recognition of neutral and arousing words at two time points and under conditions that manipulate attention during encoding. Participants were briefly presented with an arousing or neutral word at the periphery, while fixating on a central word. Recognition of peripheral words was assessed either immediately or after 24 h. Whereas recognition of neutral words became worse over time, recognition of arousing words remained the same and was better than neutral word recognition at delay. The results indicate that arousal supports slower forgetting even when the difference in attentional resources allocated to stimuli is minimized.

Take a Closer Look: Emotion Modifies the Boundary Extension Effect

Evidence has accumulated showing that central aspects of negative emotional scenes are remembered better than equivalent aspects of nonemotional scenes. Previous work, and an attentional account of these findings, led the authors to predict that anxiety-prone individuals would remember extremely negative emotional pictures as if seen from a closer perspective (i.e., with a less extended background) than other pictures. Findings showed that boundary extension was indeed reduced in high-trait-anxious individuals for very negative scenes, and this was more generally true for arousing scenes, with the exception of those with positive content. These findings are taken to be support for the view that attending to central aspects of emotionally arousing scenes can restrict the usual extended impression of surrounding space.

Ecological risk assessment (ERA) and hormesis

Based on our current state of knowledge, the significance and importance of hormesis is likely to be greater for ecotoxicology, a component of ecological risk assessment (ERA), than for the overall process of ERA. Appropriately determining the role of hormesis in ERA will require extension of hormesis beyond chemical stressors to abiotic (e.g. habitat) and biotic stressors (e.g. species introductions, organism interactions). It will also require determining for all stressors whether at both individual and higher levels of organization, hormesis has positive, neutral or adverse effects. This determination must be made for model organisms, populations and communities. Adverse effects are the least likely, however, neutral effects cannot be ruled out. Presently, consideration of hormetic effects in ERA is most appropriate in a detailed level ecological risk assessment (DLERA), the most complex form of ERA. It is not appropriate in either problem formulation or a screening level ERA (SLERA). Further, for hormetic effects to be recognized and accepted fully into ERA may require a paradigm shift. Three on-going paradigm shifts to which hormesis could be linked are: recognition of the low utility of no-observed effects concentrations (NOECs); recognition of the need for special treatment of essential element dose/concentration-responses, which are similar to hormetic responses; and, the replacement of environmental toxicology with ecological toxicology (ecotoxicology).

On inhibition/disinhibition in developmental psychopathology: views from cognitive and personality psychology and a working inhibition taxonomy

Disinhibition is a common focus in psychopathology research. However, use of inhibition models often is piecemeal, lacking an overarching taxonomy of inhibitory processes. The author organizes key concepts and models pertaining to different kinds of inhibitory control from the cognitive and temperament/personality literatures. Within the rubrics of executive inhibitory processes, motivational inhibitory processes, and automatic attentional inhibition processes, 8 kinds of inhibition are distinguished. Three basic temperament traits may address key executive and motivational inhibitory processes. Future developmental psychopathology research should be based on a systematic conceptual taxonomy of the kinds of inhibitory function relevant to a given disorder. Such an approach can clarify which inhibition distinctions are correct and which inhibition deficits go with which disorders.

Cognitive activity and physiological arousal: processes that mediate mood-congruent memory

This research proposes that the cognitive activity associated with the experience of an emotional state mediates the occurrence of mood-congruent processing. Two experiments examined the role of cognitive activity in selective processing of words in a mood congruence paradigm. Four induction procedures were used: a depressed-mood induction, a schema induction organized around the theme of writing a paper, an arousal induction, and a control neutral-mood induction. The memory task consisted of recalling a word list composed of negatively associated and thematically organized words. Selective processing was demonstrated in conjunction with the depressed-mood and organizational-schema induction procedures. In contrast, the arousal and neutral induction procedures did not produce selective processing of words from the list. The findings support the thesis that cognitive activity mediates the selective processing typical of mood congruence as distinct from arousal processes per se. The findings are discussed with respect to the resource allocation model and semantic network theory.

Effects of melody and lyrics on mood and memory

137 undergraduate Le Moyne College students volunteered in a study on music and its effects on mood and memory. In a 2 x 3 between-subjects design, there were 2 lyric conditions (Happy and Sad Lyrics) and 3 music conditions (No Music, Happy Music, and Sad Music). Participants were asked to listen to instrumental music or mentally to create a melody as they read lyrics to themselves. The study tested cued-recall, self-reported mood state and psychological arousal. Analysis suggested that mood of participants was influenced by the music played, not the lyrics. Results also showed those exposed to No Music had the highest score on the recall test. Personal relevance to the lyrics was not correlated with memory.

Smoking and attention: a review and reformulation of the stimulus-filter hypothesis

An accumulation of evidence suggests that smoking may be reinforcing, in part, due to nicotine's capacity to enhance attentional processing. Correspondingly, the stimulus-filter model of nicotine reinforcement asserts that nicotine facilitates cognitive performance by acting as a stimulus-barrier, thereby screening irrelevant and annoying stimuli from the smoker's awareness. A review of the available data suggests that while nicotine does appear to reliably enhance sustained, divided, and focused attention, the stimulus-filter model falls short of adequately explaining the findings. An alternative, attention, allocation model of nicotine reinforcement is reviewed, the tenets of which suggest that nicotine differentially augments attentional processing via its propensity to: (a) induce attentional narrowing, and (b) increase perceptual processing capacity. The motivational implications of the model, including smokers' use of nicotine to dampen stress, are discussed.

Memory systems and the psychoanalytic retrieval of memories of trauma

Increasingly, psychoanalysis has confronted the issue of recovered memories of childhood trauma. Based on trauma research, the concept of a special traumatic memory has evolved. Overwhelming psychic experience is thought to generate a defensively altered state of consciousness (specifically dissociation), which encodes memory in unassimilated visual, somatic, and behavioral, rather than linguistic modes. Analytic reevocation and interpretation of the original altered states of consciousness then permits the transformation of "early" traumatic memory into "later" explicit memory. Examined from the vantage point of contemporary cognitive research and theory, underlying flaws may be found in these propositions when they are extended to patients without explicit memory of trauma: first, dissociation is a chameleonlike process, perhaps as closely associated with suggestibility as with trauma; second, state-dependent learning does not adequately account for the absence of explicit memory; and third, implicit memory does not map onto explicit memory in any direct or simple fashion. Consequently, the clinical application of current propositions about traumatic memory to patients without explicit memory of trauma may warrant considerable caution. Provisional guidelines are offered for estimating the validity of retrieved memories of trauma.