Judgment of Learning Reactivity for Emotional Faces

Making judgments of learning (JOLs) can directly modify future memory, which is termed JOL reactivity. Recently, JOLs were found to produce positive reactivity for negative faces but not for positive faces. The finding was interpreted as support for the changed-goal hypothesis, which posits that making JOLs highlights item differences in learning difficulty, thereby prompting people to become more performance-oriented and to focus more on items perceived as easier (e.g., negative faces) at the cost of items perceived as harder (e.g., positive faces). While face emotion was manipulated in a mixed-list design in a prior study, we used a pure list of either positive or negative faces during encoding, which minimizes incentives to change learning goals. We replicated the finding of positive reactivity for negative faces and null reactivity for positive faces even in the pure-list design. Additionally, this pattern was consistent across same-race and cross-race faces and persisted when faces were tested with neutral rather than emotional expressions, demonstrating the robustness of the finding. Our results suggest that the emotion-related difference in JOL reactivity for face recognition cannot be explained by the changed-goal hypothesis. Instead, the current findings may be explained by the elaborative processing account, which assumes that making JOLs engages more elaborative processing than people spontaneously do. Because positive faces are spontaneously processed more elaborately than negative faces during encoding, this account posits that JOLs should provide a weaker reactivity for positive faces than for negative faces.