Investigating emotion-induced retrograde and anterograde memory effects in sequences of related and unrelated words

It is of the utmost importance for an organism to rapidly detect and react to changes in its environment. The emotional oddball paradigm (EOP) has been repeatedly used to investigate the special role of emotional content in change detection. It has also proven useful in tapping emotion- induced memory effects by using emotional oddballs in a stream of neutral standard information. The present study aimed to reveal potential differential effects of oddball valence (negative, neutral, or positive) on the free recall performance of neighboring standard words. Furthermore, the semantic relatedness of the word lists was manipulated within two versions of an experiment. While oddball effects of negative emotion were observed in both versions, effects on stimuli preceding an oddball (retrograde effects) and effects on stimuli following an oddball (anterograde effects) did not reach significance. Results are additionally discussed in the light of general methodological issues of the research on emotion-induced retrograde and anterograde amnesic (detrimental)/hypermnesic (enhancing) effects.