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Brain Imaging Investigation of the Neural Correlates of Emotional Autobiographical Recollection
Published on: August 26, 2011
The influence of emotional narrative content on the self-reference effect in memory
Nishaat Mukadam1,2, Wanbing Zhang1, Xiaodong Liu1
1Brandeis University, Department of Psychology, Waltham, MA, United States.
Abstract:
This study investigated how emotional language usage impacts self-referential effects in memory in healthy older adults and individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). To heighten self-focus, 37 healthy older adults and 22 aMCI participants narrated autobiographical memories and then encoded words using a self-referencing or a semantic strategy. We were interested in how narrating autobiographical memories impacted subsequent memory. We probed narrative language usage with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count text analysis program, testing the degree to which language from the narrated autobiographical memories contain emotional (positive and negative) words that predicted the self-reference effect across groups. Results indicated that higher levels of positive emotional language were related to larger self-reference effects in memory. In conclusion, narrating autobiographical memories using emotional language influenced the effectiveness of self-referencing as a memory strategy for both healthy older adults and aMCI participants.
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