Emotion and Memory: Ongoing And Recent Work
Anger supports rapid action (e.g., to preempt or counter an opponent). Consistent with this, anger appears to simplify and streamline many cognitive processes, including comprehension and decision making. In our work, we investigate its influence on memory and judgment.
Identifying While Angry
With Mike Greenstein (St. Peter's University).In our research, people view a series of target photos (in some studies, faces; in other studies, objects). Half the participants undergo an anger induction before their memory for the photos is tested. If anger supports action, these participants should have lowered thresholds for believing they recognize a target. Consistent with this, we have found that, even in target-absent lineups, when the correct response is to say that the target is not there, angry participants make more identifications. That is, the risk of false IDs increases for angry witnesses.
Constructing A Lineup While Angry
With Mike Greenstein (St. Peter's University).A lineup is considered fair to the extent that all candidates match the witness's description of the perpetrator equally well. Following from the above reasoning about anger's impact on cognition, an increased inclination for action should lower the lineup creator's threshold for selecting lineup fillers. That is, an angry lineup creator should find a potential fillers acceptable than a neutral lineup creator would not. Thus, lineups constructed by angry people should be more likely to contain "duds", lowering the functional size of the lineup and increasing the risk that a witness will mistakenly ID the actual suspect. Studies in our lab support these predictions.
Memory For Scenes
With Sara Miller (Georgia Tech).Anger is an approach emotion. Thus, cognitive processes engaged during observation of a scene should prepare the observer for action. Because of this, objects in the scene may be remembered as closer than they actually had been. Using a variation on the classic boundary extension paradigm, we found anger to produce a boundary constriction effect. We have found that memory for objects seen while angry is distorted toward more close-up views of those objects, preferred even over the original scene. This occurs even though anger is irrelevant to the target (as it is in all of our anger studies) and even without the opportunity to interact with objects depicted in the scene.
Memory For Semantic Content
With Jon O'Rawe (Stony Brook University).Emotion directs cognitive resources toward content that is most relevant to current goals. Because anger is an approach emotion, it should increase processing priority for statements that refer to active engagement with objects. In our research, we use identical target words embedded in statements that are either active or passive. For example, a character may pick up a hair clip in order to put it in her hair, or she may pick up a hair clip in order to discard it. Anger selectively improves memory for sentences describing specific goal-oriented actions, and does not improve memory for the same objects when passive or dismissive behavior had been described.
Thus, information processing for language, faces, objects, scenes, and events is substantially and predictably impacted by anger. Even when the source of anger is irrelevant to the content of the task, an angry brain re-prioritizes its resources in a way consistent with adaptive action.