Episodic and semantic knowledge in emotional self-report: evidence for two judgment processes.

Three studies involving 3 participant samples (Ns = 39, 55, and 53) tested the hypothesis that people retrieve episodic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over short (e.g., last few hours) time frames, but that they retrieve semantic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over long (e.g., last few months) time frames. Support for 2 distinct judgment strategies was based on judgment latencies (Studies 1 and 2) and priming paradigms (Studies 2 and 3). The authors suggest that self-reports of emotion over short versus long time frames assess qualitatively different sources of self-knowledge.