Research Literature

Emotion
2003, Vol. 3, No. 4, 378–393

Copyright 2003 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
1528-3542/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1528-3542.3.4.378

Effect of Negative Emotional Content on Working Memory and
Long-Term Memory
Elizabeth A. Kensinger and Suzanne Corkin
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In long-term memory, negative information is better remembered than neutral information. Differences in processes important to working memory may contribute to this emotional memory enhancement. To examine the effect that the emotional content of stimuli has on working memory performance, the authors asked participants to perform working memory tasks with negative and neutral stimuli. Task accuracy was unaffected by the emotional content of the stimuli. Reaction times also did not differ for negative relative to neutral words, but on an n-back task using faces, participants were slower to respond to fearful faces than to neutral faces.
These results suggest that although emotional content does not have a robust effect on working memory, in some instances emotional salience can impede working memory performance.

Hamann, 2001, for reviews). The effect of emotional content on working memory processes remains unknown.
Working memory is a limited capacity system required for the ability to maintain and manipulate information over short periods of time (e.g., a few seconds) in the service of other cognitive tasks (e.g., problem solving; see Baddeley & Hitch, 1974;
Cowan, 1988, 1995; Engle, Kane, & Tuhulski, 1999;
Engle & Oransky, 1999; Jonides & Smith, 1997). The specifics of the system continue to be debated. In an influential model, Baddeley and colleagues (Baddeley
& Hitch, 1974) proposed that working memory consisted of two storage buffers (the phonological loop for verbal information and the visuospatial sketchpad for nonverbal information). The coordination of these buffers was proposed to be elicited by a central executive (modeled as the Supervisory

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