The Effects of Emotional Valence and Arousal in the Free Recall of Serbian Nouns

Recent studies demonstrated inconsistent patterns of results regarding emotional valence (EV) and arousal (A) in memorising words. According to the representational substitution hypothesis, emotions play a central role in representing abstract words, predicting a larger valence effect in the lexical processing of abstract words. Conversely, the multimodal induction hypothesis suggests that emotions may be more accessible for concrete words, as emotions can be readily evoked by activating relevant sensorimotor experiences. In our study, we tested these hypotheses through the incidental free recall task. During the implicit learning phase, 276 psychology students estimated different aspects (vividness of mental images associated with words, EV, and A) of the 64 Serbian nouns (32 concrete, 32 abstract). Concrete and abstract nouns were additionally divided into groups of positively and negatively valenced words that were either low or high in arousal. The stimuli were averaged for length, frequency, familiarity, age of acquisition, and context availability. The higher recall for positive words was recorded, regardless of concreteness, and for words with lower arousal. However, arousal had a distinct effect on abstract negative words, enhancing their recall. The concreteness effect was evident only for non-arousing negative words, highlighting the importance of sensory-based representations for less emotionally charged words during recall. These findings suggest that emotional experience plays a more critical role in representing abstract words, supporting the representational substitution hypothesis. However, since we did not include neutral words, we cannot completely reject the multimodal induction assumption.