The emotional ambiguity hypothesis posits that as items are encoded, people process the ambiguity as well as the intensity of their valence. The hypothesis predicts three signature effects, all of which have been reported: ambiguity-driven declines in valence-arousal correlations, a quadratic law relating perceived valence to valence ambiguity, and improvements in episodic memory as a function of increases in valence ambiguity. After reviewing evidence on these effects, we evaluated fuzzy-trace theory’s proposal that the ambiguity hypothesis should apply to a broad range of semantic attributes other than valence (e.g., categorization, concreteness, meaningfulness). According to that proposal, all three effects should be observed for other attributes. They are. In Experiment 1, ambiguity-driven reductions in attribute correlations were identified for seven other attributes. In Experiment 2, 16 other attributes obeyed the quadratic law. In Experiments 3–5, three other attributes displayed ambiguity-driven improvements in recall. It appears that people process the ambiguity as well as the intensity of many semantic attributes, and hence, the memory effects of such attributes can be due to either or both.

情感歧义假设假定，当项目被编码时，人们处理歧义以及它们的效价的强度。该假设预测了三种特征效应，所有这些效应都已被报道：模糊性驱动的价 - 唤醒相关性下降，将感知价与价模糊相关联的二次定律，以及作为价模糊增加的函数的情景记忆的改善。在审查了这些影响的证据后，我们评估了模糊迹理论的提议，即歧义假设应适用于除效价之外的广泛语义属性（例如，分类、具体性、意义）。根据该提议，对于其他属性，应观察到所有三种效果。他们是。在实验 1 中，为其他七个属性确定了属性相关性的模糊驱动减少。在实验 2 中，其他 16 个属性服从二次定律。在实验 3-5 中，其他三个属性显示了模糊驱动的召回改进。似乎人们处理许多语义属性的歧义和强度，因此，这些属性的记忆效应可能是由于其中之一或两者。