摘要：

The topic of this dissertation is a classic, controversial and yet unsolved problem of psychological research. The question of interest is: What is the influence of the affective quality of an experience on memory for that experience? Reviews of the literature exposed a lack of (1) theoretical diversity in the hypotheses generated and tested and (2) methodological sophistication necessary to produce an unconfounded laboratory test of the relationship. In this research, a method was devised that (1) was free of the confounds of previous research and (2) allowed interpretation of the data in terms of established principles of memory. Three hypotheses regarding the affect/memory relationship were tested:(1) a "hedonic" mechanism in memory--better memory for pleasant than unpleasant or neutral material; (2) an affective intensity principle--better memory for both pleasant and unpleasant material than neutral (or less intensely affective) material; and (3) schema-assisted retrieval of affective information. In this research, subjects constructed 24 sentences, in each of which they used an affectively neutral target noun which they embedded in a description of a hypothetical event of varying affective quality. The critical dependent variable was free recall of the target nouns. This procedure of testing memory for an affective "tracer" allowed for a test of the affect/memory relationship, without testing memory for the affective information itself. Overall, the five experiments showed strong support for the affective intensity hypothesis--subjects recalled more targets embedded in sentence of greater than lesser affective intensity. This was evident in the significant quadratic trend in the data. Based on predictions generated from schema theory, it was proposed that memory for affective information would be determined by the nature of the schema in relation to which the information was processed. Specifically, it was found that high self-esteem subjects showed superior recall for unpleasant events (inconsistent with the existing schema) on an immediate recall test. After a delay, high self-esteem subjects showed a different pattern of results--an affective intensity effect, as well as slightly better memory for pleasant than neutral or unpleasant information. Results are discussed in terms of some principles of schema theory.

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