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Faculty Advisors

Maria Rowlett

Description

The relationship of how emotions impact the way a person remembers events has helped improve fields outside of psychology, such as criminal justice and biology. Most studies that explore emotions and recall have had inconclusive results due to factors such as participants being tasked with free recall in response to stimuli such as the study done by Gorlin et al. (2018). With that knowledge, the current study focused on a task of recall from a short list of words along with a direct stimulus in the form of an emotional or non-emotional passage with hopes that it would affect the short-term memory enough to result in lesser recollection amongst the group of participants who received the emotional stimuli passage. Sixty-four participants were recruited through email and social media, they received either the non-emotional passage or the emotional passage. An independent t-test was conducted to test whether participants that read the emotional passage recalled fewer words than those who read the non-emotional passage. The results, however, were found to be not significant. A limitation to this study was the sample size, and a larger number of participants is needed. Due to the study being conducted online over the summer months, finding an adequate number of participants proved to be very challenging. Future research should host a larger sample size to have a better chance for a significant finding.

Publication Date

2021

Department

Psychology

Keywords

emotion, recall, short-term memory, memory processes, recollection

Student Publication

This item is part of the McNair Scholars Program.

The Impact Emotions Have on Recall

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