Effect of negative emotional pictures on associative memory for peripheral information.

We investigated the influence of negative emotional pictures on associative memory. A visual object was embedded in the periphery of negative emotional or neutral pictures. Memory was assessed for central item (pictorial) information, peripheral (object) information, and the association between item and peripheral information. On tests of item information, negative emotional pictures were remembered better than neutral pictures. However, associative memory between item and peripheral information was less accurate when the pictures were negative compared to neutral. This occurred despite equivalent recall (Experiments 1 and 2) and recognition (Experiment 2) for the peripheral objects themselves. Further experiments confirmed that performance on the associative test was not influenced by testing order (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that negative emotional arousal can particularly disrupt the associative binding of peripheral information to a central emotional event.

The influence of self-regulatory focus on encoding of, and memory for, emotional words.

We investigated self-regulatory focus (Higgins, 1997, 1998) as one source of variation in encoding of, and memory for, emotional words. Participants wrote about their hopes and aspirations (promotion focus) or duties and obligations (prevention focus). In a subsequent incidental encoding task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants evaluated emotional (positive and negative) and neutral words as either good or bad. A surprise memory test followed, outside the scanner. We observed a dissociation in posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), where activity during the evaluation task was greater when words were focus-consistent (positive for the promotion focus group, negative for the prevention focus group). Similarly, activity in a parahippocampal region was related to subsequent memory, but only for focus-consistent words. Given the role of the PCC in self-referential processing and episodic retrieval, and the parahippocampus in memory-related processing, these data suggest that regulatory focus influences which items are preferentially associated with self-referential information in memory. Such preferential processing may help explain why events are remembered differently by different individuals, which subsequently may influence interpersonal interactions.

Dissociating medial frontal and posterior cingulate activity during self-reflection.

Motivationally significant agendas guide perception, thought and behaviour, helping one to define a 'self' and to regulate interactions with the environment. To investigate neural correlates of thinking about such agendas, we asked participants to think about their hopes and aspirations (promotion focus) or their duties and obligations (prevention focus) during functional magnetic resonance imaging and compared these self-reflection conditions with a distraction condition in which participants thought about non-self-relevant items. Self-reflection resulted in greater activity than distraction in dorsomedial frontal/anterior cingulate cortex and posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus, consistent with previous findings of activity in these areas during self-relevant thought. For additional medial areas, we report new evidence of a double dissociation of function between medial prefrontal/anterior cingulate cortex, which showed relatively greater activity to thinking about hopes and aspirations, and posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus, which showed relatively greater activity to thinking about duties and obligations. One possibility is that activity in medial prefrontal cortex is associated with instrumental or agentic self-reflection, whereas posterior medial cortex is associated with experiential self-reflection. Another, not necessarily mutually exclusive, possibility is that medial prefrontal cortex is associated with a more inward-directed focus, while posterior cingulate is associated with a more outward-directed, social or contextual focus.