Laugh (or Cry) and You Will Be Remembered: Influence of Emotional Expression on Memory for Vocalizations.

The article presents a study which investigates the influence of emotion on memory for nonlinguistic vocalizations. In this study, 40 healthy volunteers participated. All participants had normal audition and no history of hearing impairments. Moreover, 72 nonlinguistic vocalizations, each produced by a different speaker, were chosen from a previously validated database. Results show a memory advantage for emotional nonlinguistic vocalizations, compared with neutral ones. The effect was due to the emotionality of the stimuli.