Duygu Geriye Dönük Belleği Artırır mı? Türk Örneklemi Üzerinde Bir Araştırma
Does Emotion Enhance Retrospective Memory? A Research on the Turkish Sample

Summary/Abstract: An emotional event like a terrible traffic accident is remembered better than a neutral event. Recent research showed that emotionally enhanced memory might be due to the consolidation processes that take place after encoding. Consolidation is a process that enables memory traces to become stronger as time passes and resistant to interference. Presenting emotional pictures after neutral stimuli, compared to presenting neutral pictures, enhanced remembrance of these neutral stimuli. The point that attracts the attention of researchers is the automatic influence of emotional events on preceding neutral stimuli that are no longer in view. However, there is not enough evidence about the generalizability of this effect to other cultures like Turkish culture. The goal of this study is to examine whether emotional stimuli improve memory for preceding neutral stimuli in the Turkish sample. Two experiments were conducted, and 66 and 22 participants were in the first and second experiments, respectively. High arousal or low arousal pictures were presented after neutral pictures. Memory performance was measured after one week by a recognition test. The observed memory improvements in the literature could not be replicated with Turkish participants. The findings show that the effect of emotion on retrograde memory depends on culture.

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