Word imageability influences the emotionality effect in episodic memory

This study examines how and to what extent imageability influences the effect of word emotionality in episodic memory. A total of 52 young adults successively performed a free recall task and a recognition task in which word emotionality and imageability were orthogonally manipulated across six conditions of French words: low-imageability positive words (e.g., éloge [praise]), low-imageability negative words (e.g., viral [viral]), low-imageability neutral words (e.g., global [global]), high-imageability positive words (e.g., ourson [teddy]), high-imageability negative words (e.g., tornade [tornado]), and low-imageability neutral words (e.g., noyau [core]). The results from both the recall and the recognition memory tasks show that word imageability enhances memory performance. Importantly, word imageability interacted with word emotionality in both tasks. Specifically, we found that the advantage of emotional over neutral words in episodic memory performance emerged for high-imageability words only, as did the advantage of positive over negative words. These results highlight the role of imageability in the mechanisms underlying emotional word episodic memory.