The subjective sense of remembering is heightened for emotional memories, even though the objective memory accuracy is lower
Rimmele, U., Davachi, L., Petrov, R., Dougal, S., and Phelps, E. A.
Department of Psychology, New York University
Emotion strengthens the subjective experience of recollection. However, flash bulb memory studies indicate that these vivid and confidently remembered emotional memories may not necessarily be more accurate. We investigated whether the enhanced subjective sense of recollection for emotional stimuli converges with enhanced memory accuracy using the remember/know paradigm. Our results indicate a double-dissociation between the subjective feeling of remembering, and the objective memory accuracy for emotional and neutral scenes. "Remember" judgments were boosted for emotional scenes, but less coupled with accurate recollection of details and accurate emotional scene-detail associative memory. In contrast, neutral scenes given a "remember" response were associated with better recollection of details and stronger neutral scene-detail associative memory. These findings show that the strong subjective recollective experience for emotional stimuli does not reliably indicate greater recollection of details and is probably based on another mechanism than is the subjective recollective experience for neutral stimuli.