Abstract
This study examines the effects of pleasantness and arousal on memory. In Experiment 1, 34 participants viewed photographic slides and rated each slide in terms of pleasantness, arousal, and descriptive simplicity. The slides varied along the affective dimensions of pleasantness and arousal. Immediately after viewing all the slides and again one month later, the participants were given incidental memory tests in which they were asked to report on remembered slides. The results of both the immediate and delayed memory tests indicated that for the pleasant slides the participants recalled more low-arousal slides than the high-arousal ones, while for the unpleasant slides they recalled more high-arousal slides than low-arousal ones. Experiment 2 was conducted to replicate the findings from Experiment 1 with revised stimuli and procedure. The results for Experiment 2, with 71 participants, were similar to those obtained in Experiment 1. We argue that the effects of arousal level on memory performance depend on the degree of pleasantness.
