UC Riverside Undergraduate Research Journal

Prior research has suggested that adversity is linked to cognitive impairments, including reduced memory, attention, & decision-making abilities. There has also been evidence of negativity biases in memory, where humans tend to allocate more attention and remember negative information more vividly than other forms of emotional stimuli. Data was collected from students at the University of California, Riverside in an upper division psychology laboratory course between the ages 19 and 31 through an online Google Form split into different sections of which included the general demographic information (age/ gender), their recall across three trials of positive, negative, and neutral words pulled from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database, and their responses from the Stress and Adversity Inventory Screener for Adults (STRAIN). No correlation was found between adversity and overall recall performance. There was also no correlation between adversity scores and any of the emotional stimuli separately. An ANOVA found that emotional tone significantly affected recall performance, with a Post-Hoc Analysis revealing specifically that negative word recall was the lowest overall, while neutral was highest. However, there was no significant effect of emotional tone on levels of adversity. In support of the alternative hypotheses, emotional tones did have a significant effect on how frequently a valenced word was recalled. However, there was insufficient evidence to support our main hypothesis and no evidence to reject the null hypothesis, suggesting that there is no relationship between adversity and memory performance.