Ira Fischler, Candice Mills, Cary Kemp, Michael McKay. Word emotionality, levels of processing and subsequent memory: An ERP analysis.
    Memory for the occurrence of emotionally evocative words is often better than for other words. It has been suggested that this emotionality effect on memory is due to a more articulated and distinctive encoding for the emotional words. This is similar to the explanation given for the advantage of “deep” semantic over “shallow” orthographic processing. We therefore concurrently manipulated word emotionality and level of processing in an incidental memory paradigm. During the study phase, participants made either animateness (semantic) or double-letter (orthographic) judgments to emotionally pleasant, unpleasant and neutral words. In a subsequent memory test, studied emotional words were recognized better than were neutral words. Event-related potentials elicited by emotional words at study showed a topographically broad, enhanced late positivity (c. 400-700 ms post-onset), relative to neutral words, but only for the semantic encoding task. The emotionality effect in the ERPs was also attenuated for words that were not subsequently recognized. In contrast, the emotionality effect on memory was at least as great for the orthographic task as for the semantic task.  A similar pattern of results was obtained when memory for studied words was manipulated by a distracting secondary task during the animateness decision. These results suggest that the effects of emotionality, on the one hand, and of other factors that influence encoding and memory for words, are at least in part separable.