Angry faces dominate the short-term memory, study reveals
16 April 2009
Our brains are thought to use emotional connotations as a way to recall information better. Long-term memory seems to favour positive information, but the new study shows that this is not the same for short-term memory.
In a series of experiments researchers from Bangor University tested the visual short-term memory of over a hundred people.
They were shown groups of faces showing angry, happy or neutral expressions. After a short interval, they were shown one face and asked if they had seen it before.
Participants consistently recalled faces that had angry expressions in the display period better than those with the happy or neutral expressions.
Further experiments showed that this was not due to the participants' emotional state at the time, or the length of time given to study the faces.
"Our research suggests that we have a higher capacity for storing angry faces over brief temporal intervals" said Dr David Linden, Professor of Biological Psychiatry at Bangor University and an author on the study.
"We show for the first time that even when emotion is irrelevant to the task, our short-time memory is influenced by emotional information."
The researchers speculate that we evolved to remember happy expressions in the long-term to help promote positive future relations with other people. But we developed the short-term recall of angry faces as a way to help us deal with threatening situations.
"Angry faces potentially signal danger and thus, preferential processing may confer an advantage." said Dr Linden. "The angry face advantage, particularly in short-term memory, may be a remnant of a mechanism for processing threat that conferred an advantage during human evolution."
Image credit: Benita Denny, Wellcome Images
References
Jackson M C et al. Enhanced visual short-term memory for angry faces. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 2009.