The Effects of Emotion on Judgments of Learning and Memory: A Meta-Analytic Review

Emotional information pervades experiences in daily life. Numerous studies have established that emotional materials and information are easier to remember than neutral ones, a phenomenon known as the emotional salience effect on memory. In recent years, an emerging body of research has begun to explore the effect of emotion on metamemory. Preliminary findings show that participants offer higher judgments of learning (JOLs) to emotional than to neutral stimuli, a phenomenon termed the emotional salience effect on JOLs. The present meta-analysis integrated data from 1,887 participants, extracted from 17 qualifying studies, to examine the effects of emotion on JOLs and memory and to explore potential moderators of these effects. The results showed a medium-sized (g = 0.53 [0.41, 0.64]) emotional salience effect on JOLs, which was moderated by age and material type, as well as a small to medium (g = 0.38 [0.25, 0.51) emotional salience effect on memory, which was moderated by test format. These findings establish that emotionality is a salient cue in the theoretical framework of metamemory, and also provide some practical implications (e.g., in eyewitness testimony). However, more research is needed, especially employing high-powered pre-registered experiments, to address the signals of publication bias detected in this meta-analysis.