The effect of facial attractiveness on recognition memory of enotional words

Objective: The recognition memory tests in previous studies were either for faces recognition or emotional stimuli recognition. However, it is unknown whether facial attractiveness affects the relationship between emotion and memory. This research project examined the effect of female facial attractiveness on recognition memory of emotional words in the Asian context. Method: A total of 52 Asian female undergraduate students aged between 18 and 23 from The Education University of Hong Kong participated in this study. Female faces with significantly different attractive values and words with different valence were presented together during the encoding phase. Two old/new recognition memory tasks for both words and faces were conducted in the retrieval stage. Results: The finding showed that both positively words and the faces paired with them were better recognized than those for negatively words and neutral words. No main effect of facial attractiveness and interaction effect between attractiveness and word valence were found. Conclusion: Recognition memory and source memory could enhance for emotional stimuli. Facial context might not be powerful enough to affect memory performance compared to other contexts. Limitations and possible future directions were discussed. All rights reserved.