Delayed rating of autobiographical memories

Autobiographical memories (AMs) are voluntarily or involuntarily retrieved memories relating to a personal experience. AM’s cued by odors have been shown to be particularly emotional. We conducted two separate experiments aimed at testing whether the enhanced emotion reported with odor-evoked AM’s is due to the memories themselves being more emotional or whether this enhanced emotion reported is due to the presence of the odor during retrieval and memory rating. In Experiment 1, subjects were asked to retrieve an AM in response to pictures and odors. 48 hours later they were presented with their own memory and either the same cue or a semantically congruent cue from the other modality and asked to rate their memories on different attributes. Odor elicited AM’s were older, but not more emotional than those elicited by pictures. Experiment 2 follows a similar method, except that words replace pictures and the subjective ratings are done 30 days after initial retrieval and in the absence of all cues. Firstly, we expect to find that odor elicited AM’s are older, more emotional, more pleasant and lead to more feelings of being brought back to the event than word elicited AM’s. Secondly, we expect odor elicited AM’s to be rated more emotional when the source memory for the elicited cue is incorrect. This would be evidence that odors are actually associated with highly emotional events in memory, rather than that odor cues present during rating lead to emotional ratings of actually non-emotional memories.