ArticleFrontiers in psychology2015
Encoding of goal-relevant stimuli is strengthened by emotional arousal in memory.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Distinct Roles of Dopamine and Noradrenaline in Incidental Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Trial
- Noradrenergic mechanisms of arousal's bidirectional effects on episodic memory.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2017Trial
- Introducing the Glutamate-Amplifies-Noradrenergic-Effects (GANE) Model to the Neurocognitive Study of Emotion-Related Impulsivity.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Valence Effects on Episodic Memory in Young and Old Adults Following Exposure to Emotional Stimuli.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Immediate memory is associated with alexithymia in Chinese Han first-episode, drug-naïve major depressive disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Empathy, memory, and aging during the COVID-19 pandemic.Current research in ecological and social psychology · 2023Article
- In for a penny, in for a pound: examining motivated memory through the lens of retrieved context models.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- A Bottom-Up Validation of the IAPS, GAPED, and NAPS Affective Picture Databases: Differential Effects on Behavioral Performance.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Emotional arousal amplifies competitions across goal-relevant representation: A neurocomputational framework.Cognition · 2019Article
- Age differences in selective memory of goal-relevant stimuli under threat.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2018Article
- Locus Coeruleus Activity Strengthens Prioritized Memories Under Arousal.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2018Article
- Arousal amplifies biased competition between high and low priority memories more in women than in men: The role of elevated noradrenergic activity.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2017Article
- Individual Differences in Anticipatory Somatosensory Cortex Activity for Shock is Positively Related with Trait Anxiety and Multisensory Integration.Brain sciences · 2016Article
- GANEing traction: The broad applicability of NE hotspots to diverse cognitive and arousal phenomena.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Emotional information receives preferential processing, which facilitates adaptive strategies for survival. However, the presence of emotional stimuli and the arousal they induce also influence how surrounding non-emotional information is processed in memory (Mather and Sutherland, 2011). For example, seeing a highly emotional scene often leads to forgetting of what was seen right beforehand, but sometimes instead enhances memory for the preceding information. In two studies, we examined how emotional arousal affects short-term memory retention for goal-relevant information that was just seen. In Study 1, participants were asked to remember neutral objects in spatially-cued locations (i.e., goal-relevant objects determined by specific location), while ignoring objects in uncued locations. After each set of objects were shown, arousal was manipulated by playing a previously fear-conditioned tone (i.e., CS+) or a neutral tone that had not been paired with shock (CS-). In Study 1, memory for the goal-relevant neutral objects from arousing trials was enhanced compared to those from the non-arousing trials. This result suggests that emotional arousal helps to increase the impact of top-down priority (i.e., goal-relevancy) on memory encoding. Study 2 supports this conclusion by demonstrating that when the goal was to remember all objects regardless of the spatial cue, emotional arousal induced memory enhancement in a more global manner for all objects. In sum, the two studies show that the ability of arousal to enhance memory for previously encoded items depends on the goal relevance initially assigned to those items.
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