BEYOND GENERAL AROUSAL - EFFECTS OF SPECIFIC EMOTIONS ON MEMORY

This research examined the effects of happiness, anger, and sadness on participants' memory for different types of information in a narrativ e. Happiness and negative emotions were evoked in undergraduates(N = 2 63) by randomly assigning grades of ''A'' or ''D'' on a surprise quiz. Immediately afterwards, subjects participated in what they believed t o be an unrelated study during which they heard and recalled a narrati ve and described their emotional state. Participants in the positive e motion condition recalled more of the narrative as a whole than did pa rticipants in the negative emotion condition. Analyses based on self-r eported emotions indicated that happiness had a general facilitative e ffect on recall, whereas anger and sadness were associated with enhanc ed recall of information concerning goals and outcomes respectively. T hese findings indicate that specific emotions differ in their effects on memory and that negative emotions may facilitate selective encoding of functional information.