ABSTRACT

Disgust is remembered better than fear, despite both emotions being highly negative and arousing. But the mechanisms underlying this effect are not well-understood. Therefore, we compared two proposed mechanisms underlying superior memory for disgust. According to the memory consolidation mechanism, it is harder (but crucial) to remember potentially contaminating vs. threatening stimuli. Hence, disgust elicits additional memory consolidation processes to fear. According to the attention mechanism, it takes longer to establish if disgust (relative to fear) stimuli are dangerous. Hence, people pay more attention to disgust during encoding. Both mechanisms could boost memory for disgust. Ninety-eight participants encoded disgust, fear, and neutral images whilst completing a simple task to measure attention. After 10- or 45-min delay, participants freely recalled the images. We found enhanced memory for disgust relative to fear after 10- and 45-min delay, but this effect was larger after 45-min. Participants paid more attention to disgust than fear images during encoding. However, mixed effect models showed increased attention did not contribute to enhanced memory for disgust. Our results therefore support the memory consolidation mechanism.

摘要

厌恶比恐惧更容易被记住，尽管这两种情绪都是非常消极和激动的。但是这种影响背后的机制还不是很清楚。因此，我们比较了两种提出的关于厌恶的卓越记忆的机制。根据记忆巩固机制，记住潜在的污染刺激与威胁刺激更难（但至关重要）。因此，厌恶会引发额外的记忆巩固过程以至恐惧。根据注意力机制，确定厌恶（相对于恐惧）刺激是否危险需要更长的时间。因此，人们在编码时更关注厌恶。这两种机制都可以增强对厌恶的记忆。九十八名参与者在完成一项简单的任务来衡量注意力的同时，编码了厌恶、恐惧和中性的图像。延迟 10 或 45 分钟后，参与者自由回忆这些图像。我们发现在 10-和45 分钟的延迟，但这种影响在 45 分钟后更大。在编码过程中，参与者更关注厌恶而不是恐惧图像。然而，混合效应模型表明，增加注意力并不会增强对厌恶的记忆。因此，我们的结果支持记忆整合机制。