Emotional Memory for Film Clips

The present study employed a recently developed stimulus set of emotional film clips in order to investigate three phenomena that are relevant to the study of emotional memory: enhancement of emotional memories, mood-congruent processing, and gender differences in emotional memory. Although each of these phenomena has been explored in the past, significant questions remain about all three, and film clips have only been rarely used as the to-be-remembered information. Participants were asked to rate their emotions as they viewed each of the film clips and were then asked to return one week later, at which time they were prompted to recall as many films as they were able in as much detail as possible. Results indicated a consistent emotional memory enhancement effect, an inconsistent mood-congruence effect, and the presence of gender differences. In particular, the results highlight the interaction between item valence, emotional arousal, and recall.