[Effects of affective intensity and pleasantness on memory of dialogues]

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of affective intensity and pleasantness on memory. One hundred and nineteen undergraduates read 15 dialogues, taking one speaker's position, and then rated each dialogue on two emotional dimensions. One hour later, subjects were given an incidental memory test about the dialogues. In agreement with most research done so far, recall for affectively intense dialogues was better than recall less intense dialogues. More importantly, it was indicated that recall for pleasant dialogues was better than that for unpleasant dialogues when the intensity level was high. It is necessary to consider not only affective intensity but also pleasantness when the relation between affective nature of stimuli and recall is discussed.