Influence of the emotions on story recall

Kazue Okada, Kyoko Suzuki

Introduction

Abilities to recall stories are considered as "verbal memory function". However, story recall can be affected by not only linguistic factors but also non-linguistic ones. Some studies revealed that emotions evoked by a story seem to be related to performance of story recall (Heuer and Reisberg, 1990; Cahill and McGaugh, 1995). They invented a new task to compare ability to recall an emotional story and that of a neutral one. Although an emotional story could be recalled more easily than a neutral one, methods of evaluation were not clearly written. In addition, ability to recall an emotional story and a neutral story was not examined in the same subjects, because an alternative version was not available for repeated assessments. Thus aims of this study are to create modified Japanese version of emotional memory including an alternative version and to examine the influence of the emotions on story recall.

Subjects and methods

Healthy normal volunteers participated in this study. We prepared two sets of 11 slides. Each set of slides had two stories, one of which had emotional content and another neutral one. Eleven slides were consecutively shown to a subject. Each slide was shown for 20 s with a short narration to explain it. The first set was similar to Cahill's one, but characters were changed into Japanese people. The second set was created so that difficulty and emotionality was almost the same as the first one. All four stories are divided into three phases, 4, 4, and 3 slides each. In emotional stories, the first and the last phase were less emotional than the second phase. Immediately after presentation of the slides, they were asked to rate how emotional and how comprehensive that story was with a scale from 0 to 10. Two weeks later they were asked to recall the story and then to answer the multiple-choice recognition test of 33 questions.

Results

They rated the emotional stories more emotional than the neutral ones (p<0.01), but as comprehensive as the neutral ones. No significant difference was observed between the two emotional stories or the two neutral stories. The number of recalled slides was significantly larger in the emotional story than the neutral ones (p< 0.05). The last phase of the emotional stories were recalled in more people compared to the last phase of the neutral ones.

Conclusion

We invented modified Japanese version of emotional memory including the alternative version for repetitive assessments and confirmed that emotional experience could enforce memory of a story. We will use this test to examine the role of amygdalas in emotional memory in patients with anterior temporal lobectomy.