Emotional stimuli have recall advantage compared to non-emotional stimuli (Kensinger & Corkin, 2003). Moreover, anxiety could lead to attentional hijacking and memory bias towards negative stimuli (Mogg & Bradley, 2006). In the current study, we investigate whether emotionally arousing auditory stimuli have a memory facilitating effect on the recall of paired neutral verbal stimuli and whether this effect could change according to trait anxiety or depressive tendencies. In the encoding task, participants will listen three categories of sounds (e.g. positive, negative and neutral) while they are rating the relatedness of these sounds and words. After a distractor task, surprise free recall task will be presented. After free recall, participants perform in recognition task. We expect that the words paired with emotional sounds will be recalled and recognized more than the words paired with neutral sounds. If attentional hijacking of negative sounds is effective, people who have higher trait anxiety will recall and recognize less words paired with negative sounds compared to words paired with positive sounds. However, if negative sounds increase the arousal for people who have higher trait anxiety, then we should observe more correct recall of the words associated with negative sounds. We will discuss how emotional stimuli could affect the recall of unrelated and neutral stimuli and whether this effect could be moderated by trait anxiety and depressive tendencies
