emotionality of encoding activity in face memory

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN PERSONALITY 17, 198-217 (1983)

Emotionality of Encoding Activity in Face Memory

JOHN H. MUELLER, MARTIN HEESACKER, MICHAEL J. Ross, AND DOUGLAS R. NICODEMUS

University of Missouri, Columbia

The effects of emotionahty of study tasks on face recognition were examined. Subjects made either personality decisions or self-comparisons about the people shown in a series of photographs. The personality traits judged during the encoding tasks had been selected to be either arousing or relatively nonarousing. Face recognition performance was best after an emotional nonself study task, on both immediate and delayed tests. In a companion study examining these manipulations in verbal memory, self-reference study tasks produced the best word recognition, with no difference due to the emotionality of nonself tasks. These results suggest emotional&y and self-awareness have diierent effects on facial and verbal memory. A final study indicated that the effect of emotionality disappeared if it was added to self-reference. As regards self-reference differences in face and verbal memory, this series of experiments seems to rule out an emotionality confounding. It was concluded that self-images are less effective mnemonic aids than the propositional self-concept.

This report is concerned with the manner in which memory is affected when attention to our self-concept is activated during study. Specifically, we will examine the interaction of emotionality and self-focusing in face memory. Face memory is especially appropriate because it seems closer to an interpersonal situation than studying a set of verbal materials. Furthermore, our self-appearance is a matter of obvious daily concern, so much so that neglect in this regard is often taken as a symptom of maladjustment, and facial features seem especially salient in this regard. Although most self theories acknowledge a “physical self,” recent work on self-awareness has focused instead upon the verbal or propositional aspect of the self concept (e.g., Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977), thus it seems important to extend this line of research to the nonverbal features of the self-concept.

All correspondence should be addressed to J. H. Mueller, Psychology Department, 210 McAlester Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211. The authors thank Robert Arkin, Donald Kausler, and Richard Petty for feedback on an earlier draft, and also acknowledge Richard Petty for suggesting the inclusion of the “personality” group in Experiment 4.

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0092-6566183 $3.00 Copyright 8 1983 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

EMOTIONALITY AND FACE MEMORY 199

Recent research on memory for faces has shown a quite reliable effect for type of processing during study. Specifically, when confronted with a stranger in a photograph, memory for that person’s face was enhanced if the observer had to make a decision about a personality trait such as honesty, rather than attending to some physical feature, such as the size of the nose. This outcome can be interpreted in terms of the “depth of processing” view of memory (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) by assuming that personality traits require deeper processing than encoding physical features (e.g., Bower & Karlin, 1974).’ The experiments to be reported here extended this line of research by using study tasks differing in emotionality, and compared memory strength after such processing to the level of retention following induced self-awareness during study.

Several recent studies have shown a positive effect on verbal memory when the subject’s self-concept is involved during study (e.g., Bower & Gilligan, 1979; Keenan & Baillet, 1980; Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977). To induce attention to the self, subjects are required to decide for each word in a study set whether it describes them. This paradigm generally yields two results of interest. First, retention levels often are better following self-comparisons than after a semantic decision, such as “Is the word a synonym of (X).” Second, words that are self-descriptive are remembered better than nondescriptive words, though the effect is not robust in any single experiment (Kuiper & Rogers, 1979, p. 511; Rogers, 1981, p, 198). However, self-comparisons with facial stimuli generally fail to produce the first of these results. In other words, deciding whether a person in a photograph looks like you does not improve memory performance above levels associated with decisions about general personality traits, such as dependability. A number of experiments have found that self-reference tasks were no better than general personality decisions (e.g., Courtois & Mueller, 1979; Mueller, Courtois, & Bailis, 1981), though self-reference generally yields performance about as good as nonself judgments about personality characteristics. The second effect, due to descriptiveness per se, is usually found with faces as well as words in that faces judged to look like you are easier to identify than dissimilar faces.. The present research thus was directed to clarifying the first effect, namely, why self-comparisons of face do not yield memory levels better than other study tasks.

Two possible explanations will be considered for this variation in the effect of self-reference for verbal and facial memory. One interpretation focuses upon an apparent difference between the imaginal and the propositional components of the self-concept, Lord (1980) has recently discussed

’ Winograd (1981) has provided a convincing argument that “distinctiveness” is perhaps a better interpretation with facial stimuli. The present research does not bear on this particular issue because all of the processing involves tasks that are comparable, i.e., all “deep,” thus yielding access to distinctive features.

200 MUELLER ET AL.

the potential difference in the mnemonic value of a visual representation of one’s self as opposed to the information contained in the set of prop- ositions that summarizes our knowledge about one self-schema. Evidence reviewed by Lord suggested that the self-image is not as helpful as involvement of the conceptual aspects of the self-schema. Such an analysis clearly suggests a basis for expecting differences in self-reference effects with faces and words. However, the present experiments were not con- ceived as direct tests of Lord’s interpretation, though we will return to this viewpoint later. Instead, the rationale for the present studies derived from a different basis, namely an interest in the general effect of emotionality on face memory and how this affective component of processing might relate to self-comparisons.

A recent paper by Zajonc (1980) discussed the relationship between emotion and cognition in memory, and, among other things, suggested that the retention advantage associated with self-reference decisions might be attributed to the emotional arousal that self-focusing produces. The connection between arousal and self-focus has also been considered by others. For example, Keenan and Baillet (1980) found that the personal significance of a decision was a factor only when the judgment was evaluative in nature (i.e., self-reference was not beneficial when the decision was a factual matter). Breckler and Greenwald (Note 1) found that decision speed was affected by whether or not the trait in question set the self apart from others in a favorable or unfavorable direction, in accord with the importance of an evaluative component in self-comparisons. The connection between self-focus and arousal has also been examined by many others (e.g., Wegner & Giuliano, 1980), and there appears to be evidence for an effect of emotionality in verbal memory, and for arousal being associated with self-comparisons.

Whether this arousal is solely responsible for the self-reference effect is unclear. Rogers (1981) has argued that while there is a link between evaluation and self-reference, self-reference shows properties that dif- ferentiate it from other evaluative judgments. Specifically, Rogers (1981) argues that affect serves as “an early warning system,” directing attention to salient aspects of the present task. This model assumes that affect generated by self-reference can amplify ongoing processing, resulting in a “more embellished” memory trace, whereas the affect in nonself evaluative tasks cannot be so readily incorporated into cognitive processing. Hull and Levy (1979, p. 764) also have expressed some doubt that self- awareness per se is an affect-inducing state.

Thus, while there is not unanimity on the details of the matter, it is not unreasonable to assume some link between self-comparisons and affective processes in memory. At the outset, it seemed plausible that the affect aroused by self-awareness would help resolve the discrepancy between verbal and face memory studies with regard to the superiority


of self-reference over other encoding activities, in a manner to be detailed shortly. This approach also should enhance our understanding of the general effects of self-comparisons on memory because the affective aspect of self-awareness is regarded as critical in producing self-comparison effects in memory (cf. Greenwald, 1981; Rogers, 1981; Zajonc, 1980). In particular, further data should help establish the generality of the argument that self-comparisons are not solely due to the same evaluative component that is also involved in emotional nonself judgments (Rogers, 1981). Furthermore, experiments along these lines should also be useful in clarifying the role of affect in face memory per se, quite apart from any interaction of arousal and self-comparisons.

The experiments presented here derived from the basic position that self-referencing generates affect which leads to a more durable memory trace. Some of the apparent variation in results for verbal and face memory research might then be resolved as follows. With words, the advantage of self-reference over other tasks was originally shown for nonself tasks such as synonymity judgments. Because synonym decisions are not likely to be very arousing, the self-nonself comparison with verbal stimuli may have been partially confounded by an emotional- nonemotional difference. (This is a variant of the argument proposed by Keenan & Baillet (1980), in that the self-focus advantage occurs only when evaluative judgments are involved.) With faces, however, the tasks that have been compared to self-reference, such as intelligence and dependability judgments, are themselves likely to be somewhat arousing in that they are implicitly evaluative. Furthermore, faces are different from words in that a decision about the personality of someone in a photograph implies a possible social interaction with the person, and thus perhaps intrinsically arouses the subject more than a word list does. Therefore, even if arousal due to self-awareness occurs and affects retention of faces and words similarly, the emotionality associated with the nonself comparison tasks in face research may have more closely matched the affect in the self-reference condition than has often been the case with trait adjective stimuli. The result would be that self-nonself contrasts may have tapped emotional-nonemotional differences with verbal stimuli and emotional-emotional differences with faces.

This analysis is somewhat complicated by data that appeared after the experiments reported here were underway. Rogers (1981, p. 208) reported that self-reference decisions were superior to both nonevaluative (e.g., synonymity) and evaluative (e.g., pleasantness) nonself judgments for words. However, whatever may be the case with words, nonselfjudgments about people may be nearly as emotional as self-reference because of the implied interaction. That is, the difference in intensity between evaluative nonself judgments and self-comparisons with words may be greater

202 MUELLER ET AL.

than the intensity difference between self-reference and nonself evaluations of faces.

Ultimately, of course, the relative benefits of emotional and nonemotional nonself judgments for faces must be determined empirically, and then evaluated in terms of their relationship to the self-comparison task. That is, how does emotionality per se affect face memory? In addition, the relationship between emotionality and self-reference with faces needs to be demonstrated empirically, because by now it is clear that we cannot presume the pattern will directly match that for verbal memory. To clarify the interaction of affect and self-focusing requires some emotional abstract (i.e., nonself) judgments that could be made for faces, and some nonemotional or less arousing trait judgments. First, for these nonself judgments, we expected that emotional nonself judgments would lead to better retention than nonemotional judgments (cf. Zajonc, 1980). Our second hypothesis was that self-reference judgments would prove comparable to emotional nonself judgments, both being better than nonemotional nonself judgments because each of the first two activities generates the affect described by Zajonc as beneficial to retention. Ex- periment 1 was a test of these hypotheses.

EXPERIMENT 1

Method: Screening Phase To determine the affect associated with various decisions about people, 17 male and 20

female students in undergraduate psychology courses rated each of 54 judgments for emotionality. The interest was similar to that underlying Anderson’s (1968) likeability ratings, but since comparable affect might be associated with likeable and unlikeable aspects

we needed a different scaling. Most of the present judgments involved trait adjectives, but some were more general, such as, “Does the person have any children?” The task was presented by asking the subjects to imagine that another person was approaching them on campus, and the experimenter then described the specific aspect of the approaching stranger that was to be considered. For each dimension, the subject was required to rate on a 9- point scale how much emotionahty, positive or negative, would be elicited by making that judgment about the other person. Ten seconds were allowed for rating each dimension.

While we included a few negative dimensions among the 54 to be rated, these were avoided in the final selection because the positive and negative items both tended to be rated as arousing. That is, there were no negative nonemotional items, so it was not feasible to vary this dimension orthogonally with the emotional-nonemotional dimension. Therefore, it was decided not to attempt a covariation of polarity of affect and magnitude, but instead vary intensity alone. (In fact, Robinson (1980) presents evidence to suggest that intensity rather than pleasantness is the more pertinent dimension in retrieval.) Therefore, the decisions used here were all fairly positive in tone (see below), and the absolute difference in emotional intensity may thus be somewhat conservative compared to what might be achieved by contrasting highly desirable dimensions with very undesirable or negative dimensions (e.g., violent, threatening).

Five of the 10 lowest rated dimensions were selected for use as nonaffective orienting tasks in the memory phase, all being rated less than 3.0 on the 9-point scale. These nonemotional tasks, with their rank out of 54 shown in parentheses (1 being least emotional),


were as follows: pragmatic (lo), member of large family (8.5), methodical (8.5) punctual (5.5), and vegetarian (3). Similarly, 5 of the 10 highest rated dimensions were chosen as the emotional tasks, all having been rated as 6.1 or higher on the 9-point scale: attractive (53), friendly (52), energetic (50) affectionate (49), and fashionable (44.5). Five versions of each type were used to enhance the generalizability of any emotionality effects that are obtained.

As a way of checking the arousal associated with self-comparisons, that decision was included among the 54 judgments that were rated. Deciding “whether the approaching person looks like you” was rated at 6.31 on the 9-point scale, ranking it 7th from the top in emotionality. On this basis, it appears that the assumption that self-focusing evokes an emotional reaction is reasonable, and that it is about as arousing as the nonself emotional tasks selected for use here, though not the very most arousing decision. Furthermore, two of the personality traits often used in previous face memory studies (e.g., Courtois & Mueller, 1979) were also rated high in emotionality, friendliness being third and intelligence being 17th. Of course, not all abstract nonself traits were rated as emotional, but several were, in accord with the analysis that previous self-nonself comparisons with faces may have been quite comparable in terms of the emotionality associated with the alternative tasks.

Method: Memory Phase

Subjects. Sixty introductory psychology students, 30 men and 30 women, served as subjects, in return for bonus points in the course. They were randomly assigned to either the affective, nonaffective, or self-reference groups.

Materials. Eighty black-and-white slides were made of portraits of college seniors. Half of the slides were of males and half were of females (all Caucasians, as were the subjects). Portraits with unusual features (e.g., beards or glasses) were not used. These were divided into two sets of 40 slides each, 20 males and 20 females in each, and each set was used as the target and distractor set across subjects.*

Study phase. The “study” phase was disguised as a rating ‘task, and the recognition test was not mentioned at this stage of the experiment. The 40 target slides were presented one at a time at a 5-set rate. Subjects considered each target face according to the relevant dimension, then rated the face on a S-point scale (1 being nondescriptive and 5 being descriptive, or 1 being low and 5 being high on the personality dimensions), marking their responses on answer sheets at their desk. A third of the subjects made a judgment involving one of the five affective traits, another third made a judgment about one of the nonaffective traits, and the remaining subjects made ajudgment of similarity to themselves. Each subject made only one type of judgment for all 40 faces. Subjects were tested in groups of lo-20 people.

Tesr phase. The incidental learning test began approximately 5 min after the study phase. The test involved presenting the 40 old slides and 40 new slides, randomly intermixed, one at a time at a 5-set rate. Subjects identified each slide as old or new by marking their answer sheets. Guessing was neither encouraged nor discouraged. Before being dismissed, subjects were asked a series of questions pertaining to test expectancy, confidence in their performance, anxiety, distraction, perceived task difficulty, and perceived benefit of the study task.

’ The faces were not chosen to systematically vary the target’s emotional expression. Given the purpose of college yearbook portraits, most of the people were either smiling or otherwise trying to look pleasant, with varied success.

204 MUELLER ET AL.

Results

For analysis, target slides rated as 1 or 2 during study were classified as nondescriptive (or negative decisions in the nonself tasks), and items rated 3-5 were labeled as descriptive (or affirmative in the nonself tasks). This pooling provided a sufficient number of “yes” and “no” choices to allow the addition of choice as a two-level within-subject factor to the between-subjects study task factor in all analyses (except false aknms, because the distracters were not rated). This procedure still yields a different number of “yes” items in each task (in this case, the mean number of “yes” items was 21.1, 23.4, and 10.3 for the emotional, nonemotional, and self-reference tasks, respectively). Therefore, the data to be reported here will involve hit rates, to correct for such variation; total correct identifications of “yes” (“no”) faces were divided by the number of “yes” (“no”) faces, in a manner analogous to the proportion of recall measure used for the same purpose by Rogers et al. (1977) and others. Furthermore, we will present the signal detection measure, d’, which takes into account covariation in hit rate and false-alarm rate (so that, for example, 35 hits with 5 false alarms is not treated the same as 35 hits with 20 false alarms). Of course, separate analyses of hits and false alarms provide data on the effect of self-reference on old-item retention versus new-item retention, but the d’ measure may provide a better overall assessment of that effect on face recognition. Table 1 presents a summary of recognition performance in each condition. Effects described as significant involved a rejection level of .05 or better, and effects not mentioned failed to reach that level.

The Task main effect was significant for hit rate and for d’ (F’s(2, 57) = 3.72 and 4.21, MS, = .028 and .701) but not for false alarms (F = 1.08). The Choice main effect was not significant (F’s < 1.77), nor

TABLE I

RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE FOLLOWING STUDY TASKS DIFFERING IN EMOTIONALITY. EXPERIMENT I

Measure Emotional Nonemotional Self-reference

Hit rate: total .77 .72 .67 Yes items .78 .73 .70 No items .78 .7l .65

False-alarm rate .I5 .I7 .20 d’: total 1.97 1.67 I.39

Yes items 2.03 I .73 1.64 No items 2.04 I .64 1.35

Nore. Yes items were faces yielding a positive decision during study, and no items were

faces yielding a negative decision.


were the Task by Choice interactions (F’s < 1). Substantively, the best performance was associated with emotional tasks, and the worst with self-reference decisions. For overall d’, the least significant difference (LSD) was .265, so the emotional task was significantly better than the nonemotional task, and the nonemotional task was significantly better than self-reference.

Discussion

These results generally support the expectation that emotional decisions would yield better retention than nonemotional tasks. That the effect of emotional&y was not larger may be attributable to the somewhat restricted range of emotional intensity involved here, as noted above. However, the expectation that self-reference and emotional nonself tasks would prove comparably effective was not supported. Instead, self-comparisons were not as effective as emotional nonself decisions. This was somewhat puzzling because self-comparisons were judged among the more arousing decisions that could be made about a stranger. This result also stands in contrast to the data from studies of verbal memory summarized by Rogers (1981, p. 208), where self-reference was superior to evaluative (emotional) nonself decisions. If the intensity of the emotional tasks was as mild as discussed above, then it is all the more surprising that the emotional nonself task was superior to the self-focus task. The remaining experiments in this report were directed to clarifying this point.

EXPERIMENT 2

While the results of Experiment 1 clearly supported an effect for emotionality per se, the relative performance of the self-reference task was puzzling. Self-comparisons had been judged as arousing, yet subjects performing this encoding task were actually worse at face recognition than subjects who made the emotional nonself encoding decisions. Es- sentially the same result was obtained in a followup experiment that will not be reported here (Mueller, Nicodemus, & Heesacker, Note 2), so we considered some possible reasons for the curious performance of the self-reference group. One factor that seemed worth pursuing was the length of the retention interval. Conceivably, the greater relative benefit of self-reference decisions would emerge when the memory test is more demanding, as on a delayed test. Experiment 2 was conducted with a delayed test to determine whether the durability of memories established by self-comparisons would be more apparent after a longer interval than in Experiment 1.

Procedure The procedure was identical to that in Experiment 1, except that the retention test

followed the study phase by 48 hr. Fifty-four subjects, 37 women and 17 men, from

206 MUELLER ET AL.

introductory psychology courses served as subjects in return for partial credit in their courses.

The only added aspect of the procedure was a questionnaire administered on the first day, immediately after the study phase. The questionnaire was the Self-consciousness Scale (see Buss, 1980, and Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975). This inventory yields three scores: (1) Private Self-Consciousness (SC), assessing the tendency to reflect and introspect about one’s internal states; (2) Public SC, assessing the extent of concern about self- presentation to others; and (3) Social Anxiety, reflecting anxiety generated by the presence of others. This questionnaire was included to examine whether or not there was a relationship between the degree of self-awareness and the benefit derived from self-comparisons during study. Conceivably, induced self-awareness would be more effective for those subjects who “know more about themselves,” as identified by the Private SC scale.

Several studies suggest there is such a relationship for verbal memory. For example, Lord (1980, Experiment 2) reported that the difference in recall of self-referent and other- referent items was greater for subjects scoring high on Snyder’s (1974) self-monitoring scale. Turner (1978) found that social anxiety and private SC scores on the Fenigstein et al. (1975) scale were related to decision speed for trait adjectives. Finally, Hull and Levy (1979) likewise observed recall differences as a function of scores on the Fenigstein et al. scale. Extrapolating from these findings, it was our hypothesis that subjects scoring high on the private SC component of the Fenigstein et al. scale would perform better on a face memory task involving self-comparisons than subjects low on this component of self- awareness.

Results

Table 2 summarizes recognition performance by condition. Analysis revealed a significant task main effect for false alarms (F(2, 51) = 4.67, MS, = .017), with more false alarms following the self-comparisons study task. While the nonself groups maintained aobut the same false-alarm rate as on the immediate test (Tables 1 and 2), the self-reference task produced considerably more acceptances of new faces as actual targets on a delayed test than was the case on the immediate test. In terms of correctly identifying old items, though, the hit rates in Tables I and 2 suggest that the delay was less detrimental for self-reference than for

TABLE 2 RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE FOLLOWING STUDY TASKS DIFFERING IN EMOTIONALITY.

EXPERIMENT 2

Emotional

Hit Rate: total .63 Yes items .62 No items .68

False-alarm rate .I4 d’: total 1.65

Yes items 1.61 No items I .99

Nonemotional Self-reference

.67 .65

.68 .68

.68 .66

.I9 .?7 1.43 I.10 1.44 I .6? I.51 I.10

Note. Yes-items were faces yielding a positive decision during study. and no items were faces yielding a negative decision.


nonself judgments in terms of identifying actual targets. The only other significant effect was the Task x Choice interaction for d’ (F(2, 51) = 4.71, MS, = .392). As Table 2 shows, self-reference led to performance as good as emotional decisions for positive items (i.e., those judged similar to one’s self), but the emotional nonself task led to the best performance on negative items (i.e., those judged as not satisfying the criterion). The main effect of task was not significant for d’ (F(2, 51) = 2.00, MS, = .974), nor were any effects significant for hit rate (F’s < 1).

Table 3 presents the correlations (n = 54) between the three scores on Buss (1980) Self-Consciousness Questionnaire and recognition performance. High social anxiety was associated with worse retention (more false alarms and lower d’ values), but there was no evidence that the other aspects were related to recognition performance. Though the data in Table 3 are pooled over tasks, there was no obvious difference when the correlations were considered in each group. We will return to this question in a later experiment.

Discussion

Experiment 2 revealed a pattern of results essentially in accord with Experiment 1 and Mueller et al. (Note 2). That is, self-reference produced the worst recognition performance in terms of d’ and false alarms, though the differences were not as pronounced as in Experiment 1. Thus it appears that a delayed test does not reveal the alleged stronger memory traces derived from self-comparisons, except possibly for the Yes items (see d’ in Tables 1 and 2). The self-comparison task did yield quite good performance for faces similar to one’s own, but still not the very best, and self-reference was still the worst for faces judged not similar to self.

The difference due to the emotionality of the nonself decisions was diminished somewhat on the delayed test, comparing Tables 1 and 2.

TABLE 3 CORRELATIONS BETWEEN RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS (SC) SCORES,

POOLING OVER ALL ORIENTING TASK CONDITIONS

Experiment 2 Public SC Private SC Social anxiety

Experiment 4 Public SC Private SC Social anxiety

Hit rate False alarms d’

- 14 -01 -08 05 OS 08

-02 32% -35*

01 05 -06 -07 01 02

06 04 02

* 4 < .05.

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On the face of it, this might seem in conflict with the notion that affect enhances retention, but we think there is another factor involved, namely what has been called “mood congruence.” Several studies (e.g., Bower, 1981; Leight & Ellis, 1981) have reported that memory performance is best when the emotional state is the same at the time of study and at testing. It can be argued that the affect aroused by making the emotional study decisions in Experiment 2 dissipated over the 48-hr retention interval. Thus subjects with the emotional study tasks were confronted with a mood incongruence at the time of the test, whereas those subjects who made the nonemotional decisions during study were not faced with con- flicting mood states at study and test. This being the case, the superiority associated with emotional study tasks that is apparent in Table 1 is likely underestimated in Table 2. One specific point favoring this analysis is that for the emotional groups in Tables 1 and 2 it is the Yes items that show the loss with a delay (2.03 vs 1.61 and 2.04 vs 1.99). If an affirmative outcome for an emotional judgment is more arousing than a negation, then this pattern of results is in accord with a mood congruence interpretation.

In sum, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 support a positive effect for emotionality on face memory, at least on an immediate test. In addition, we have recently obtained a large advantage for emotional decisions over nonemotional decisions in immediate face recognition when task was varied within subjects (Thompson & Mueller, Note 3), so there is substantial evidence in support of an emotionality effect. However, the original analysis of the role of emotionality in self-comparisons is not supported.

EXPERIMENT 3

The purpose of Experiment 3 was to simulate with verbal materials the procedures used in Experiments 1 and 2. The goal of this experiment was to determine whether or not the relationship between emotionality and self-awareness tasks was the same for faces and for words using comparable procedures. The procedures of Experiments 1 and 2 are somewhat different from the studies of self-reference in verbal memory (e.g., Rogers et al. 1977) in ways other than just substituting faces for words. For example, in verbal memory studies, subjects generally have not made the same decision for all items, instead making self-referent judgments for some items and nonself decisions for other items. It could be argued that such methodological differences might account for the anomalous results with faces. In the present study, we sought to manipulate the emotionality of the synonym task in a fashion that would allow fairly direct comparisons with Experiment 1 and 2. As nearly as possible, except for the type of stimuli (words instead of faces), the procedure was identical to Experiments 1 and 2. Of course, this may be an apples-


oranges comparison in terms of absolute levels of performance, but the pattern of results (Le., rank ordering of the three tasks) should be informative.

Method Subjects. Sixty students from introductory psychology courses participated for extra

credit, and they were assigned 20 per group to each of the three encoding tasks. Materials. Eighty adjectives were selected from the trait likeableness norms collected

by Anderson (1968). Forty were positive items, with likeableness ratings above 4.5, and forty were negative items, with likeableness ratings below 1.7. All 80 were selected from among the most meaningful subset in the norms. These words were presented to the subject on a screen by an automatic slide projector.

Procedure. As with the faces in Experiments 1 and 2, the study phase was disguised as a rating task. The subjects in the self-reference condition had to rate the extent to which each word described them, using a 5-point scale (I being nondescriptive). The remaining subjects made a synonymity judgment, also indicated on a 5-point scale for comparability. Those in the emotional synonym group decided for each word to what extent the word meant the same as one of the five emotional characteristics used in Experiments 1 and 2 (attractive, friendly, etc.). The nonemotional synonym group decided whether each word meant the same thing as one of the five nonemotional dimensions (methodical, punctual, etc.).

The remainder of the procedure was similar to Experiment 1. The study slides were presented one at a time at a 5-set rate, with subjects marking their responses to each of the 40 words on a computer answer sheet. The unannounced task followed immediately. The test sequence was composed of the 40 old and 40 new words randomly ordered. The test items were presented at a 5-set rate, with subjects marking an answer sheet “old” or “new” for each slide.

Results

Table 4 summarizes the results of Experiment 3. Substantively, the data indicate very clearly that self-comparisons yielded better retention than both the emotional and nonemotional synonym tasks, the latter two not very different in any respect. The task main effect was significant

TABLE 4 RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE FOR TRAIT ADJECTIVES BY ENCODING TASK, EXPERIMENT 3

Synonym judgments

Emotional Nonemotional Self-reference

Hit rate: total .85 .83 .91 Yes items .88 .85 .91 No items .83 .80 .92

False-alarm rate .24 .21 .13 d’: total 1.87 1.90 2.78

Yes items 1.98 2.07 2.77 No items 1.84 1.78 2.88

Note. Yes items were words yielding a positive decision during study, and No items were words yielding a negative decision.

210 MUELLER ET AL.

for hit rate (F(2, 57) = 6.09, MS, = .014), false alarms (F(2, 57) = 5.85, MS, = .Oll), and d’ (F(2, 57) = 12.05, MS, = .914). Descriptive items were recognized better in terms of hit rate (F(1, 57) = 5.84, MS, = .005), but the Choice main effect was not significant for d’ (F = 2.09). The Task x Choice interaction was not significant for either hit rate or d’ (F’s < 2.37).

Discussion

The results of Experiment 3 revealed that self-comparisons led to better performance than semantic decisions, as has been found in previous research using different procedures (e.g., Rogers, et al., 1977). Furthermore, these results are in accord with the data summarized by Rogers (1981, p. 208) in that self-reference was even superior to emotional nonself decisions. Duplicating this pattern of results directly, with procedures unlike those Rogers (1981) used to establish the ordering, serves to reinforce the generality of this effect in verbal memory. On the other hand, that the procedures used here reproduce the common finding of superiority for self-reference with verbal stimuli makes it possible to rule out a procedural artifact as an explanation for the results with face stimuli. That is, the self superiority result was replicated with words using the very same procedures that produced no superiority for faces. For example, Experiments 1 and 2 had subjects make the same decision for each face, whereas most of the research on self-reference with verbal materials has had each subject make nonself judgments about some words and self-descriptiveness decisions about other words. Experiment 3, though, suggests that the homogeneous decision method does not artifactually eliminate self-reference superiority. Experiment 3 also makes it possible to rule out a recall (word) versus recognition (face) difference as an explanation of the discrepancy between self-comparison effects with verbal and facial stimuli (Mueller, Courtois, & Bailis, 1981), because all three of the present experiments used recognition and still showed a different effect for self-reference judgments about faces and trait adjectives. All in all, the data point to a more general difference in the effect of self- awareness on verbal and pictorial, or at least facial, stimuli.

Experiment 3, with verbal materials, also differs from Experiments 1 and 2 in terms of the effect of emotionality. Just why this should occur is not clear. It may be derived from the procedure in that the aspects of personality judged to differ in emotionality simply may not come into play when that dimension is activated in a synonym judgment because the synonym task is nonevaluative. This is further confounded by the fact that the scaling of emotionality was based upon judgments involving people and not upon semantic content per se, so that the emotionality distinction here is less pertinent outside the context for which the scaling was done. Thus, deciding whether a person in a photograph is friendly


or methodical may allow the differences in affective arousal to be ap- propriately experienced, whereas deciding whether a word means the same as friendly or methodical may not generate the requisite affective difference, or that difference may only appear with a latency measure as opposed to hit rate. In sum, there are other ways to examine the effect of emotionality on verbal memory, but they are beyond the scope of this report. Experiment 3 was designed to serve primarily as an analog for Experiments 1 and 2, and appears to have served that purpose fairly well.

EXPERIMENT 4

Experiments 1 and 2 provided useful information about the effects of emotionality in face memory relative to self-reference. Experiment 3 revealed a different but expected pattern for verbal processing, thereby diminishing the likelihood that the results of Experiments 1 and 2 are procedural artifacts. There remains yet another way in which one can examine the interaction of self-reference and emotionality, and this was the focus of Experiment 4. Specifically, does emotionality continue to have an effect when the decision involves one’s self? That is, does processing an emotional attribute continue to produce superior retention relative to a nonemotional attribute when the question is targeted to self- reference in each case, as in, for example, “Is the person as friendly as you, ” versus “Is the person as punctual as you.” In Experiments 1 and 2, the emotionality effect emerged to nonserf decisions. That general effect of emotionality on face memory is of interest in its own right, quite apart from how self-reference affects face memory, and yet the results can be compared to the emotionality ostensibly associated with self-focusing. However, one also can make an emotionality manipulation while holding self-reference constant, thereby tapping the interaction of self-reference-induced arousal and the emotionality associated with the particular feature being examined.

Experiment 4 thus varied emotionality within self-reference judgments, and compared these benefits to the general self-reference decision used in Experiments 1 and 2 (i.e., “Does the person look like you”) and to a decision that seems less likely to evoke the imaginal component of the self-concept: “Does the person have the same personality as you?” As noted earlier, the imaginal component seems intrinsic to face judgments, but it may be possible to activate the more effective propositional network of self-knowledge by using a decision that less specifically accesses physical appearance. It was thought that this decision might activate primarily the nonimaginal components of the self-concept, and thus a comparison of the “general” self-reference and the “personality” tasks might reveal some differences in the functioning of these two aspects of the self

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system. The inclusion of this group thus represents an exploratory effort to separate these two components.

Procedure The procedure was essentially the same as Experiments 1 and 2. Eighty subjects, 50

males and 30 females, from introductory psychology courses participated for bonus points in the course, and they were randomly assigned to each of the four encoding tasks. The five emotional and five nonemotional decisions used before were rephrased to involve self- reference, such as “Does the person look as energetic as you,” or “Does the person look as methodical as you,” with each version being equally assigned among the 20 subjects in the emotional and nonemotional groups. Another 20 subjects made the self-reference decision exactly as in Experiments 1 and 2 (“looks like you”), which will be referred to as “general” self-reference in this experiment because it specifies no particular attribute. The remaining 20 subjects rated the extent to which the person had the same personality as them. Each study decision was indicated on a S-point scale as before, and the presentation rates, slides, and so forth were as in Experiments 1 and 2. The Self-Consciousness Ques- tionnaire (Fenigstein et al., 1975; Buss, 1980) was administered between the study and test phases, resulting in a retention interval of about 10 min (instead of immediate or 48 hr).

Results

Table 5 summarizes recognition performance in this experiment. De- scribed as briefly as possible, there were no significant differences among the four tasks, and no significant choice main effects or Task x Choice interactions (all F’s < 1.88). The data thus indicate no effect of emotionality when the decision actually induces self-focusing.

Table 3 summarizes the correlations (n = 80) between recognition performance and the various measures derived from the Self-Consciousness Questionnaire. Nothing in the data indicates a significant relationship between face memory and private self-consciousness, and even the cor-

TABLE 5 RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE FOLLOWING SELF-REFERENCE STUDY TASKS, EXPERIMENT 4

Versions of self-reference task

Emotional Nonemotional General Personality

Hit rate: total .74 .75 .75 .73 Yes items .72 .75 .75 .72 No items .76 .76 .77 .75

False-alarm rate .19 .I6 .19 .16 d’: total 1.64 1.84 1.76 1.72

Yes items 1.87 1.91 1.79 1.80 No items 1.72 1.87 1.81 1.84

Note. Yes items were faces yielding a positive decision during study, and No items were faces yielding a negative decision.


relation with social anxiety that occurred in Experiment 2 was not replicated.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

These studies involved two main questions, self-reference effects on face memory and the effect of emotionality on face memory. The self- reference implications will be considered first, in terms of (1) self similarity, (2) self-awareness, and (3) self-focusing study tasks.

Similarity to Self

As Greenwald (1981) and others have noted, organizing experiences by reference to the self-concept is a very pervasive strategy, and when we do so with portraits we find that similar faces are remembered better than those which are judged dissimilar to our own. Because the ease of recognizing faces does covary with judged similarity to one’s self-image, we can conclude that self-referencing is, in principle, feasible with such stimuli. Yarmey and Johnson (1982) have also provided a nice demon- stration of the existence of self-images in face memory.

Individual Differences in Self-Awareness

Two less supportive findings emerged here, but each is useful in high- lighting the boundaries of the self-reference phenomenon. One qualifying result was the observation that self-reported differences in self-consciousness did not affect any aspect of face recognition performance (Table 3). Whether this is limited to one particular definition of self- awareness is not clear. Some experiments have had to resort to an overt manipulation to effectively induce self-consciousness differences, such as the presence of a small mirror during the experiment. There is an obvious superficial propriety about the presence of a mirror in a face memory study, but it seems unlikely that the results would be much changed by such an additional inducement. That is, keeping in mind that the purpose of the mirror was to heighten self-awareness in situations where it was necessary to disguise that aspect of the experiment, it seems quite reasonable to believe that overt self-comparisons during study ought to effectively induce self-awareness. Yet if this is granted, then Experiments 2 and 4 here indicate little benefit due to high self- awareness as measured by this particular scale (see also Mueller, Ni- codemus, & Ross, 1981).

While the evidence for a relationship between self-awareness and face memory is clearly lacking for the Fenigstein et al. measure, it is conceivable that some other measure, perhaps one more specifically concerned with the self image, might show an effect due to level of self-awareness. For example, Miller, Murphy, and Buss (1981) have presented data on body-

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image consciousness, an index which may be more pertinent to the component of the self-concept that is activated in face judgments. In fact, this body-image measure even includes a few items specifically assessing face knowledge. A classification of subjects by this method might reveal more clearly those subjects who are “schematic” or “as- thematic” (Markus & Smith, 1981) in terms of facial information. In this regard, some preliminary data we have recently collected suggests that subjects who are high in body awareness indeed do perform better on some aspects of face memory (Mueller, Ross, & Heesacker, Note 4).

Self--Comparisons versus Nonself Orienting Tasks

The other limiting aspect of the present data concerns self-focusing as a study task. These results demonstrate that virtually any personality decision leads to face memory at least as good as a self-comparison study task. This was clear in Experiments 1 and 2 here, and has been reported in other studies (e.g., Courtois & Mueller, 1979; Mueller, Courtois, & Bailis, 1981). Therefore it seems unlikely that any simple methodological artifact in the face research will account for the fact that self-comparisons do not yield superior retention (including emotionality, as will be discussed later). In fact, even if some study now could demonstrate superiority for self-comparisons of faces, one would have to consider the effect at least nonrobust in view of the many circumstances where self-referencing has produced “only” comparable benefits or actually somewhat lesser memory strength (as in Experiment 1 here).

The position most consistent with these results has been developed by Lord (1980). He distinguished between a self-concept consisting, on the one hand, of a set of verbal abstractions, a self-schema, and, on the other hand, a self-image, the latter being a visual representation of our- selves. Evidence reviewed by Lord (1980) indicated that the self-image was a less effective mnemonic aid than the verbal schema. Face memory seems an especially appropriate vehicle for testing this position, and the evidence presented here generally supports the idea that invoking the self-image is no better than several alternative study strategies.3 It may be that the primary advantage of cognitive schemas is lost with facial stimuli, at least for the self-image. The benefits due to comparing present inputs to cognitive structures may be the ready incorporation of new events into a stable organizing scheme, including the verbal representation of the self-concept (e.g., Bower & Gilligan, 1979). But if so, arbitrarily

3 This being the case, it is hardly surprising that self-consciousness differences had little impact on recognition performance. Furthermore, this analysis is also consistent with an incidental result often observed in face memory studies, namely the lack of correlation between face memory and indices of mental imagery ability (e.g., Courtois & Mueller, 1981).


updating or revising our image of our own face is not a reasonable or adaptive development, thus the value of self-comparisons as a study task is reduced. It may be that some people who routinely see themselves in different face makeup, such as actors or models, would be able to role play to some advantage in this regard, but for the most part changes in one’s face usually occur only gradually and thus a resistance to change seems wholly appropriate. While the “same-personality” procedure used in Experiment 4 did not appear to be effective in terms of separating the imaginal and propositional components of the self-schema, further work along such lines may yet prove successful, and face memory seems a viable format for such efforts.

Emotionality and Self-Focusing

Finally, the other theoretical questions these data bear on concern (1) the role of affect on face memory, and (2) the interaction of evaluative arousal with the affect that may attend self-comparisons. As regards emotionality per se, affective judgments about faces clearly led to better retention, across different retention intervals and for both positive and negative judgments, provided that emotionality is considered without self- referencing (as in Experiments 1 and 2, rather than Experiment 4). Such a result is consistent with Zajonc’s (1980) formulation, and supports the position that face stimuli are well suited to studying emotionality effects in memory. Photographs of strangers may be less susceptible to the “cognitive” encoding that automatically occurs with meaningful words (and perhaps photographs of familiar people), making the separation of cognitive and affective components easier with face stimuli. The auto- maticity of affective judgments about people is illustrated in our ability to later express an attitude about someone we have met only briefly even when we could not accurately describe face features such as hair color. It seems clear that face memory is enhanced by the arousal of affect in certain ways, though the effect of other types of emotionality (e.g., self-report anxiety) may be debilitating (e.g., Mueller, Bailis, & Goldstein, 1979). The connections between arousal defined in these different ways remains to be specified (see, for example, Hormuth, 1982).

The effect of emotionality induced by self-reference is less clear. It has been argued that self-comparisons are arousing (Greenwald, 1981; Zajonc, 1980), and our preliminary rating of self-comparisons in Experiment 1 suggested they are as arousing as the emotional nonself tasks used here. However, there was some evidence that emotional nonself judgments led to better retention than self-reference judgments. In one sense this is consistent with Roger’s (1981) view that self-reference and nonself evaluative tasks are not identically effective, though in this case the direction is reversed. However, the reversal seems likely due to the fact that the limited benefits of the imaginal aspect of the self-concept may

216 MUELLER ET AL.

preclude the enhancement that potentially occurs for an arousing ex- perience. This is in accord with the ineffectiveness of the emotionality manipulation in Experiment 4: when the self-image is activated, the effect of other processes is moderated by this relatively ineffective memory aid. (Interestingly, Mueller, Bailis, & Goldstein (1979) also observed that the effect of emotionality, defined there in terms of test anxiety, was eliminated when self-comparisons were made, providing some generality for this result.) The alternative view that self-reference is so effective that further benefits are not possible seems contradicted by the relative performance of that group in Experiment 1.

CONCLUSIONS

At the outset, we wanted to determine whether emotionality was a confounding factor in self-comparisons of faces, relative to self-reference with words. It appears that such confounding is not the case, and instead a more fundamental difference is involved, namely the ineffectiveness of the imaginal component of the self-concept. However, emotionality per se does have an effect on face memory, and facial stimuli would appear to be productive materials for the further study of affective processes in retention, as well as a vehicle for separately examining the propositional and imaginal aspects of the self-image.

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REFERENCE NOTES 1. Breckler, S. J., 8~ Greenwald, A. G. Favorable self-referent judgments are made faster

than non-favorable ones. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Detroit, 1981.

2. Mueller, J. H., Nicodemus, D., & Heesacker, M. Emotionality and self schemas in facial memory. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Detroit, 1981,

3. Thompson, B., & Mueller, J. H. Hemispheric dominance, extraversion, and emotionality in face memory. Unpublished manuscript, 1982.

4. Mueller, J. H., Heesacker, M., & Ross, M. J. Body-image consciousness and self- reference effects in face recognition. Manuscript submitted for review, 1982.

emotionality of encoding activity in face memory

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