Jessica Payne

Extensive research has revealed enhanced attention and memory for emotional relative to neutral content. Amongst emotional information, valence effects can also arise: negative information often is preferentially attended and remembered relative to positive information, although the opposite valence effect can also occur. Little research has examined how valence effects in attention relate to valence effects in memory. This is the open question we addressed in this study, by tracking the eye gaze of 53 participants (ages 18–64) while they viewed scenes composed of an emotional (positive or negative) or neutral object superimposed on a neutral context and then tested their memory the next day. Emotional (positive or negative) objects were gazed at longer and recognised better than neutral objects. Amongst the emotional objects, there was a different effect of valence on attention and memory: positive objects were gazed at longer than negative objects while recognition memory was better for negative than positive objects. These valence effects were not modulated by age, and the attentional and mnemonic effects of valence were not correlated. These results suggest a dissociation in the mechanisms supporting valence effects on attention and memory.

Emotion regulation (i.e. either up- or down-regulating affective responses to emotional stimuli) has been shown to modulate long-term emotional memory formation. Further, research has demonstrated that the emotional aspects of scenes are preferentially remembered relative to neutral aspects (known as the emotional memory trade-off effect). This trade-off is often enhanced when sleep follows learning, compared to an equivalent period of time spent awake. However, the interactive effects of sleep and emotion regulation on emotional memory are poorly understood. We presented 87 participants with pictures of neutral or negative objects on neutral backgrounds paired with instructions to either increase or decrease their emotional response by altering personal relevance, or to passively view the stimuli. Following a 12 h period of sleep or wakefulness, participants were tested for their memory of objects and backgrounds separately. Although we replicated the emotional memory trade-off effect, no differences in the magnitude of the trade-off effect were observed between regulation conditions. Sleep improved all aspects of memory, but it did not preferentially benefit memory for emotional components of scenes. Irrespective of a period of sleep or wake following encoding, findings suggest emotion regulation during encoding did not influence memory for emotional items at a 12-hour delay.