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The relationship between induced emotional arousal and amnesia
Author(s) -
CHRISTIANSON SVENÅKE
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1984.tb01007.x
Subject(s) - arousal , amnesia , psychology , recall , retrograde amnesia , cognitive psychology , skin conductance , developmental psychology , social psychology , medicine , biomedical engineering
An experiment was conducted to test a hypothesis emanating from a similarity in data pattern between studies on amnesia and studies on the effects of arousal on memory. The hypothesis was that arousal and amnesia might be related, or more precisely, that amnesia induced in the laboratory might be mediated by high levels of arousal. Subjects in this experiment were presented with a thematic, short story in pictorial form. One version of the story consisted of a traumatic, arousal‐inducing event placed between neutral events. A second version of the story contained the same neutral events in the beginning and the end, but also a neutral event in the middle. Palmar skin conductance, heart rate, and subjective self‐ratings were used to determine that the manipulation made had caused different degrees of emotional arousal for the two groups of subjects presented with the different versions of the story. The methods used to determine memory performance were recall and recognition. The data obtained indicate that amnesia induced in the laboratory is mediated by emotional arousal in terms of concepts of attention and reconstruction.