Remembering the snake in the grass: Threat enhances recognition but not source memory.

Research on the influence of emotion on source memory has yielded inconsistent findings. The object-based framework (Mather, 2007) predicts that negatively arousing stimuli attract attention, resulting in enhanced within-object binding, and, thereby, enhanced source memory for intrinsic context features of emotional stimuli. To test this prediction, we presented pictures of threatening and harmless animals, the color of which had been experimentally manipulated.

Influences of Age and Emotion on Source Guessing: Are Older Adults More Likely to Show Fear-Relevant Illusory Correlations?

Objectives: The present study investigates age differences in the vulnerability to illusory correlations between fear-relevant stimuli and threatening information.

Method: Younger and older adults saw pictures of threatening snakes and nonthreatening fish, paired with threatening and nonthreatening context information ("poisonous" and "nonpoisonous") with a null contingency between animal type and poisonousness. In a source monitoring test, participants were required to remember whether an animal was associated with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness.