Are affective events richly recollected or simply familiar? The experienceand process of recognizing feelings past

The author used the remember/know paradigm and the dual process recognition model of A. P. Yonelinas, N. E. A. Kroll, I. Dobbins, M. Lazzara, and R. T . Knight (1998) to study the states of awareness accompanying recognition o f affective images and the processes of recollection and familiarity that m ay underlie them. Results from all experiments showed that (a) negative sti muli tended to be remembered, whereas positive stimuli tended to be known; (b) recollection, but not familiarity, was boosted for negative or highly a rousing and, to a lesser extent, positive stimuli; and (c) across experimen ts, variations in depth of encoding did not influence these patterns. These data suggest that greater recollection for affective events leads them to be more richly experienced in memory, and they are consistent with the idea that the states of remembering and knowing are experientially exclusive, w hereas the processes underlying them are functionally independent.