Remembrance of emotional speech: Improvement and impairment of incidental verbal memory by emotional voice

Journal/Book: J Exp Soc Psychol. 1996; 32: 525B Street, Suite 1900, San Diego, CA 92101-4495. Academic Press Inc Jnl-Comp Subscriptions. 289-308.

Abstract: Drawing on a growing body of literature on the attention-capturing potential of emotional stimuli, two studies examined some mnemonic consequences of an exposure to emotionally spoken communications. Subjects (total N = 108) performed a memory span task, in which they were to commit to memory either 2 or 4 2-digit numbers for 20 s. During this interval, a spoken sentence varying in emotional intonation was presented as a distraction stimulus. When the load of the memory span task was heavy, emotional intonations, especially negative ones, improved incidental verbal memory of the sentence. By contrast, when the load was light, both emotionally positive and negative intonations impaired the incidental verbal memory. These findings were interpreted to support the hypothesis that when a message is delivered in an emotional voice, it captures attention and, further, that the attention thus allocated to the message is divided between the voice and the verbal tone. Implications for the operation of selective attention in daily social settings were discussed. (%O Article S Kitayama, Kyoto Univ, Fac Integrated Human Studies, Sakyo Ku, Kyoto 60601, Japan

Keyword(s): INFORMATION; PERCEPTION; ATTENTION; COGNITION; ACCESSIBILITY; AUTOMATICITY; HYPOTHESIS; JUDGMENTS; EVENTS; CHILD

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