Abstract
The present study aims to compare the effect of the emotional elaboration on incidental memory with that of the semantic elaboration. Participants were presented targets and asked to rate the congruity of a emotional information elicited by it in the emotional elaboration condition and that of a trait of the object named by it in the semantic elaboration condition, followed by unexpected free recall. The results of Exp. 1 indicated the superiority of the emotional elaboration to the semantic elaboration. But the results of Exp. 2 using different procedures did not show the superiority of the emotional elaboration. In Exp.3, participants were asked to generate the information of the emotion elicited by a targetor or that of the trait of the object named by it. The result of Exp. 3 revealed that the emotional elaboration led to better recall than the semantic elaboration in the middle stage of retrieval.
