Date of Award
2011
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science
Program
Psychology
Supervisor
Dr. Stefan Köhler
Abstract
Emotion enhances the encoding and consolidation of memory traces, leading to the salient reliving of emotional experiences. In the recognition memory literature, the induction of somatic arousal and feelings of perceptual fluency during retrieval have been associated with illusory familiarity. Understudied in this literature is an investigation into how one’s emotional state, independent of stimulus content, influences recollective and familiarity-based recognition memory retrieval. Two priming paradigms were employed in the current thesis research to contrast the effects of affective priming and identity priming on familiarity and recollection using the Remember/Know procedure. Enhanced familiarity-based discrimination was revealed using affective priming, selective to participants with low overall recognition performance. Identity-priming resulted in a response bias, indicative of an induction of erroneous feelings of familiarity. Both manipulations failed to influence recollection. These results illustrate that a heightened affective state can provide selective benefits to familiarity, dissociating from a confused sense of familiarity induced through increased perceptual fluency.
Recommended Citation
Duke, Devin, "Emotion’s Influence on the Evaluation of Familiarity" (2011). Digitized Theses. 3348.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/3348