Remembering Emotional Events: An Eye-tracking Study

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to investigate the effects of the emotional content of an event and participants’ perspective on the memory and eye-track measurements for central and peripheral details. Event memory refers the memory for details about an event itself. The type of remembered details of an event can differ according to emotional content of an event. Additionally, emotional content of an event can also effect the eye-track measurements. The participants were 130 volunteer undergraduate male students. Three digital colorful, static and emotional real life pictures (positive, negative, neutral) were manipulated in this study. According to 3 (emotional content: positive, negative, neutral) X 2 (Participants' perspective: Own perspective, Observer perspective) factorial ANOVA results event memory (central and peripheral free recall scores) and eye-track measurements (fixation duration, fixation count) differs according to emotional content of an event, participants' perspective and their interaction effect. In this study, it is observed that attention is not enough by itself for a better remembering of an emotional event and enhanced memory for negative emotional event can occur independently of attention.