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Psychological versus physiological determinants of emotional arousal and its relationship to laboratory induced amnesia
Author(s) -
CHRISTIANSON SVENÅKE,
NILSSON LARSGÖRAN,
MJÖRNDAL TOM,
PERRIS CARLO,
TJELLDEN GUNNAR
Publication year - 1986
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.1467-9450.1986.tb01208.x
Subject(s) - arousal , psychology , stimulus (psychology) , amnesia , recall , audiology , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , neuroscience , medicine
Psychological and physiological aspects of emotional arousal were studied concerning their possible roles in mediating amnesia. Subjects were presented with a series of slides consisting of photographs of faces, with each face accompanied by four verbal descriptors. For half of the subjects emotional arousal was induced by means of a source not related to the stimulus material; these subjects were injected with adrenalin and presented with neutral pictures throughout the series. For the other subjects the source of emotional arousal was associated with the stimulus material. These subjects were unexpectedly presented with traumatic slides in the middle of the series. Measurements of palmar, cardiac, and cortical activity were taken continuously during stimulus presentation. Memory performance was measured by means of a cued recall test of the verbal descriptors accompanying the faces. Physiological data as well as post‐experimental ratings by the subjects indicated that at the time of the study subjects under both sets of conditions were equally aroused emotionally. However, memory performance for those subjects presented with traumatic slides was clearly below the level of the subjects who were injected with adrenalin. These data suggest that amnesia is mediated by emotional arousal when the source of arousal is related to the to‐be‐remembered items rather than to high arousal per se (cf. Walker, 1958, 1967).