Abstract
The current study aims to present the main lines of the topic by compiling the literature on the effect of emotion on recognition memory and address some considerations for future studies by highlighting the attention-grabbing points related to emotion-memory interaction. A growing body of literature has demonstrated that emotional stimuli are better remembered than their neutral equivalents. Based on these common findings, research in the relevant literature is reviewed in detail regarding various approaches that define and explain emotion; and the effect of emotional dimensions, which are defined within the framework of different approaches, on recognition memory is mentioned. Empirical studies are also reviewed by including the findings on the response biases that emotion might cause. On the other hand, the factor affecting memory performance is not solely due to emotional stimuli' dimensions. Instead, memory performance might be positively affected by the context of emotional stimuli. Additionally, how emotional memory is studied in a controlled laboratory setting is discussed. Within this context, emotional databases developed to investigate emotion-memory interaction and databases designed for research to be carried out in Turkey are discussed. To sum up, within the scope of the current review, it is concluded that future studies on emotion and recognition memory interaction should take response bias caused by emotion, emotional context, and type of emotional stimuli into account to reach more consistent results.
Keywords
Emotion, recognition memory, response bias, context, databases