Remembering pictures: Pleasure and arousal in memory.

Bradley, Margaret M., Greenwald, Mark K., Petry, Margaret C., Lang, Peter J.·1992·Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
DOI 10.1037//0278-7393.18.2.379

Abstract

Incidental memory performance for pictures that varied along the affective dimensions of pleasantness and arousal was assessed. For both an immediate and delayed (1 year later) free-recall task, only the arousal dimension had a stable effect on memory performance: Pictures rated as highly arousing were remembered better than low-arousal stimuli. This effect was corroborated in a speeded recognition test, in which high-arousal materials encoded earlier in the experiment produced faster reaction times than their low-arousal counterparts. Pleasantness affected reaction time decisions only for pictures not encoded earlier. These results suggest that whereas both the dimensions of pleasantness and arousal are processed at initial encoding, long-term memory performance is mainly affected by arousal.

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    LANG, PETER J., GREENWALD, MARK K., BRADLEY, MARGARET M., HAMM, ALFONS O. · 1993 · Psychophysiology
  3. The emotion probe: Studies of motivation and attention.
    Peter J. Lang · 1995 · American Psychologist
  4. Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting
    Bromberg-Martin, Ethan S., Matsumoto, Masayuki, Hikosaka, Okihide · 2010 · Neuron
  5. The limited capacity model of mediated message processing
    Lang, Annie · 2000 · Journal of Communication

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Remembering pictures: Pleasure and arousal in memory. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0278-7393.18.2.379
The paper
Bradley, M. M., Greenwald, M. K., Petry, M. C., & Lang, P. J. (1992). Remembering pictures: Pleasure and arousal in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1037//0278-7393.18.2.379

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