Remember it with love: Effects of love priming on text recall

Common sense often presents love and science, feelings and reason, as opposite realities: one person reasons without her heart, another has his reasoning impaired by love. More specifically, emotion is thought to lead to a narrowed focus of attention, with enhanced information recall being associated with experiences of emotional significance (Levine & Edelstein, 2009). Moreover, the ability to focus attention is reduced to such an extent by the experience of emotion that other processes that require this capacity can be impaired. Love has been characterized as a constellation of emotions and as a motivational experience, both definitions being overlapping (Aron et al., 2008). Love does not imply a basic, distinct emotion, but it generates multiple emotions (joy, contentment, sadness, jealousy) that are related to a person’s level of satisfaction. As a motivational state, love is the search for the presence of and affection from a loved one. Similarly, love can be conceived as an amalgam of discrete positive emotions that broaden the scopes of attention, cognition, and action (Fredrickson, 2001). The effect of love, like other positive emotions, is, thus, to arouse enthusiasm and interest, to provoke reaction and decision, and