Modulation of emotion-enhanced recollection by gender and task instructions

Previous work has shown recognition of emotional facial expressions may differentially relate to task demands, such as whether one indirectly or directly encodes the emotional information. Given gender differences in emotion processing and memory, we assessed whether participant gender might moderate these encoding task effects. Using a between-subjects design with a sample of 100 undergraduates, participants made judgments about the gender (indirect) or emotion (direct) of facial stimuli displaying fearful, angry, happy, and neutral expressions. Different task-related effects were observed by gender for faces accompanied by recollection, as measured with the Remember-Know paradigm. Namely, women demonstrated better memory discrimination for emotional facial expressions only for remember responses following indirect encoding, whereas this effect was not significant for men. These results highlight the importance of considering participant gender, type of encoding task, and level of recollection on emotional memory for faces. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).