ABSTRACT
Traditionally, emotion and memory have come under the auspices of separate fields of psychological inquiry. Affective processes have been examined by social psychologists, whereas exploration of the functioning and development of the human memory system has been the province of cognitivists. Recently, enormous progress has been made independently in these two areas of psychology. After virtually abandoning the topic for 30 years, over the past decade researchers have shown a resurgence of interest in emotion (Campos, 1984), and this has fortified our knowledge base concerning emotional processes and their development. At the same time, our understanding of memory, an area of consistent interest, has benefitted from new theoretical insights and methodological tools (e.g., Brainerd, Reyna, Howe, & Kingma, 1990; Kail, 1990; Schneider & Weinert, 1990). Concomitant with the strides made in studying both affect and memory, researchers in the 1980s began a departure from the century-old tradition of treating them as independent psychological matters. Indeed, over the past decade investigators have shown an enhanced interest in combining our knowledge of cognition in general with that of socioemotional processes. This return in spirit to the early days of psychology, when the human organism as a whole was the subject of inquiry, has been reflected in a number of edited volumes and special issues of journals devoted to the interplay between emotion and cognition (e.g., Clark & Fiske, 1982; Izard, 1989). Memory, in particular, has been studied in terms of its relationship to affect by a number of researchers (e.g., Bower, 1983; Hertel, in press; Isen, 1987).
