Title
Temporal Presentation Speed and Emotional Word Encoding: The Differential Influence of Emotion on Verbal Memory Recall in Young Adults
Research
I conducted an experiment to examine whether neutral words or emotional words have a greater influence on cognition and memory.
Abstract
This study investigates how emotional word content and presentation speed affect verbal memory recall in young adults. Thirty-two participants (aged predominantly in their 20s, female-majority) were exposed to a list of 15 alternating neutral and emotional words under two conditions: a fast presentation rate (1.5 seconds per word) and a slow presentation rate (3 seconds per word). Following the presentation, participants freely recalled as many words as remembered.
Results indicated that longer presentation duration significantly improved overall memory performance, with participants in the slow condition recalling an average of 10.06 words compared to 8.25 words in the fast condition. However, emotional words demonstrated a distinct encoding pattern, showing relatively strong recall even under fast presentation, whereas neutral words required extended exposure to yield similar recall strength. Counterintuitively, the proportion of emotional-word recall relative to neutral-word recall was higher in the fast condition, suggesting that emotional content may trigger automatic semantic encoding independent of time allocation.
Notably, emotional words also generated more semantically related incorrect responses, particularly substitutions such as loneliness for fear and irritation for anger. These substitution patterns aligned with prevalent emotional states observed in the participants’ socio-economic life stage (e.g., employment uncertainty), supporting the interpretation that emotional memory is shaped by personal affective context as well as linguistic input. These findings highlight the robustness of emotional memory encoding and suggest that emotional salience may attenuate processing-time constraints in verbal recall.