This set of 72 matched pairs of pictures (each pair has one arousing and one neutral picture; 48 pairs are neutral-negative and 24 are neutral-positive) is available in three separate zip files for research purposes.

Highly arousing negative pictures with neutral matches.
Moderately arousing negative pictures with neutral matches.
Moderately arousing positive pictures with neutral matches.

Mather, M., & Nesmith, K. (2008). Arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures. JML, 58, 449-464. PDF

Driving game used in Mather, Gorlick, & Lighthall (2009)

This 5-minute driving game provides a measure of risky decision making, as participants get points the more they drive during yellow lights, but risk losing all the points if the light turns red while they are driving. It is a modified version of the driving game described in Gardner and Steinberg (2005) that Steinberg and Sheldrick created (see citations below).

Driving game in Mac and PC versions. How to find output file

Sheldrick, R. C. (2004). Social networks and degree of psychopathy among adolescent offenders (Doctoral dissertation, Temple University, 1990). Dissertation Abstracts International, 65(3-B), 1564.

Gardner, M., & Steinberg, L. (2005). Peer influence on risk-taking, risk preference, and risky decision-making in adolescence and adulthood: An experimental study. Developmental Psychology, 41 , 625-635.

Mather, M., Gorlick, M. A., & Lighthall, N. R. (2009). To brake or accelerate when the light turns yellow? Stress reduces older adults' risk taking in a driving game. Psychological Science, 20, 174-176. PDF

Data from published studies

We have posted links to download behavioral data files from some of our published studies. These usually include a summary data file (the input file for the statistics program, usually with one row of data per participant) and a raw data file (one row for each response made during the task). In addition, some datasets include variable files that provide a list of the variables in the data files with additional descriptions of what they refer to. These are currently available for the following studies by following links on our publications page:

Nashiro, K., Sakaki, M., Huffman, D., & Mather, M. (in press). Both younger and older adults have difficulty updating emotional memories. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.

Knight, M., & Mather, M. (2013). Look out--it's your off-peak time of day! Time of day matters more for alerting than for orienting or executive attention. Experimental Aging Research, 39, 305-321.

Barber, S. J., & Mather, M. (2012). Forgetting in context: The effects of age, emotion, and social factors on retrieval-induced forgetting. Memory & Cognition.

Lee, T.H., Itti, L., & Mather, M. (2012). Evidence for arousal-biased competition in perceptual learning. Frontiers in Emotion Science.

Mather, M., Mazar, N., Gorlick, M. A., Lighthall, N. R., Burgeno, J., Schoeke, A. & Ariely, D. (2012). Risk preferences and aging: The "Certainty Effect" in older adults' decision making. Psychology and Aging.

Sutherland, M. R., & Mather, M. (2012). Negative arousal amplifies the effects of saliency in short-term memory. Emotion.

Sakaki, M., Gorlick, M. A., & Mather, M. (2011). Differential interference effects of negative emotional states on subsequent semantic and perceptual processing. Emotion.

Ko, S. G., Lee, T. H., Yoon, H. Y., Kwon, J. H., & Mather, M. (2011). How does context affect assessments of facial emotion? The role of culture and age. Psychology and Aging, 26, 48-59.

Nashiro, K., & Mather, M. (2011). The effect of emotional arousal on memory binding in normal aging and Alzheimer's Disease. American Journal of Psychology, 124, 301-312.

Nashiro, K., & Mather, M. (2011). How arousal affects younger and older adults' memory binding. Experimental Aging Research, 37, 108-128.

Nashiro, K., Mather, M., Gorlick, M. A., & Nga, L. (2011). Negative emotional outcomes impair older adults' reversal learning. Cognition & Emotion, 25, 1014-1028.

Mather, M., Mitchell, K. J., Raye, C. L., Novak, D. L., Greene, E. J., & Johnson, M. K. (2006). Emotional arousal can impair feature binding in working memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 614-625.

Food for thought about data sharing

There has been a lot of attention recently to cases of fraud and distortion in published research. In the discussions of possible solutions, little has been said about the potential benefits of mandatory data archiving policies. For instance, if journals required archiving of raw data as supplementary material as part of the process of publishing an article, wouldn't that make authors less likely to massage their data analyses? While the APA and many journals have policies that authors must share data upon request, authors apparently rarely comply with such requests, even when research was published in APA journals. Reluctance to share data has been shown to be related to the number of "apparent" errors in the paper's statistical reporting (such errors often involved p values that should not have been reported as significant but were). If journals (or granting agencies) required public release of data upon publication, researchers would likely be more careful about double checking their results and better about their data management practices, making it possible to easily retrieve data from studies conducted years ago. Making data available for public download should also increase the impact of the findings and benefit the scientific community in many ways.