Revisiting Emotion-Induced Memory Effects in the Emotional Oddball Paradigm: A Replication Study

The emotional oddball paradigm involves sequences of frequently presented standard stimuli and rare (mostly emotional) deviant stimuli. Presenting a highly arousing, emotionally negative deviant in a stream of neutral standard information is usually associated with a weaker recall rate (in a subsequent memory task) for stimuli that had been presented directly before the negative deviant (i.e. retrograde amnesia). This effect has often been explained by the arousal-biased competition (ABC) theory, which states that arousal biases attention towards salient stimuli and away from less salient stimuli; therefore, the focus of the ABC theory is on the arousing effects of the deviant. However, there is also evidence showing that emotionally arousing positive deviants led to enhanced recall rates for stimuli preceding the deviant (Hurlemann et al., 2005; Experiment 1). In this study we replicated the methods used in the aforementioned study from Hurlemann et al. (2005), but did neither find enhanced nor decreased recall performances for stimuli preceding positive deviants. We did, however, find weak evidence of poorer recall rates for stimuli preceding a negative deviant. The implications of these results for the ABC theory and the role of positive valence on memory are discussed.