An investigation into the effect of emotionally-appraised stimuli and attention on prospective memory

The project seeks to explore a well-researched area of the interaction between memory, attention, and emotion, but with a new set of tools. The project will develop a new set of emotional stimuli based on appraisal theories of emotion that can investigate important research questions from this area and attempt to resolve past inconsistencies in the literature.

***Aims and objectives***

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform an action at a specified future moment in time, in response to an environmental cue (Dismukes, 2012). PM incorporates multiple cognitive processes including memory encoding and retrieval, task-switching, and attention.

Emotional influences on retrospective memory (Kensinger, 2009; Mather, 2007), and attention (Brosch et al., 2010, Yiend, 2010; Pool et al., 2016) are widely recognised (Baumeister et al., 2007). Despite this, the effect of emotion on PM is unclear and previous research is inconclusive (Hostler, Wood, & Armitage, 2018). One limitation with past work has been a reliance on emotional stimuli manipulated via the dimensions of valence and arousal. These variables can capture some aspects of emotional processing, however they neglect the influence of “top-down” factors of context and personal relevance of stimuli. Appraisal theories of emotion and a wealth of empirical data highlight the importance of these influences on whether and how emotional stimuli are processed (Brosch et al., 2010; Scherer, 2013). There are many variables derived from other areas of psychology that attempt to quantify the personal emotional relevance of a stimuli, including: social relevance (Sakaki, Niki, & Mather, 2011), interpretations of semantic meaning (Czekoova et al., 2016), emotional impact (Murphy et al., 2011), personal relevance (Bayer et al., 2017), relevance to goals (Scherer, 2013) and motivational intensity (Harmon-Jones, Gable, & Price, 2012).

The first aim of the PhD will be to develop a set of stimuli for use by researchers in this area which acknowledges the influence of personal appraisal on emotional relevance. The student will first conduct a comprehensive literature search to catalogue existing sets of emotional stimuli and determine their appraisal value. For example, it is known that affective stimuli exist for specific clinical populations (e.g., OCD sufferers, Marsh et al., 2009) and recent work has generated appraised word lists for students based on personality variables (Cummings et al, in press). The aim will then be to use this information to develop stimuli based on common emotional concerns of modern undergraduate students (the most common population used for this research), for example: social and academic concerns.

The dual-task paradigm commonly used to study PM involves an ongoing cognitive (e.g. lexical) decision task as well as a secondary PM task to remember to perform an action upon encountering particular stimuli. An advantage of this paradigm is that it can be adapted to work with a range of stimuli including words, pictures, symbols, and sentences. Therefore, stimuli are not limited to any particular medium. The development of the stimuli can include the use of physiological and eye-tracking measures, and the measurement and interaction with stress, trait anxiety, and depression. The outcome will be a set of stimuli that are relevant to the undergraduate student population and reliably appraised as emotional, for use in subsequent studies. Additionally, the data generated from the construction of the stimuli set will allow for investigation of whether stimuli rated as more emotional produce stronger influences on PM.

Once the stimuli and experimental set up have been tested, the next aim of the PhD will be the investigation of the influence of emotional cues on PM, using the stimuli developed. There are many open questions regarding the influence of emotion on PM and the role of attention in this, and the direction of the PhD will be discussed in collaboration with the student.

To develop the student’s research skills and improve the quality of the research, the entire project will employ high standards of Open Scientific practices, including pre-registration of analyses and open sharing of data, materials (including stimuli) and data analysis scripts.