Memory for everyday conversational speech may be influenced by the nonverbally communicated emotion of the speaker. In order to investigate this premise, three videotaped scenes with bipolar emotional perspectives (joy/fear about going away to college, fear/anger about having been robbed, and disgust/interest regarding a friend's infidelity) were developed. The perspectives differed only in the nonverbal behaviors of voice tone, body posture, gestures and facial expression. Following validation of the videotapes, 96 undergraduates, divided into 12 groups, viewed one perspective of each scene, counting specific nonverbal behaviors (shallow processing) or rating the meaning of those behaviors (deep processing). Either immediately or after 1 week, memory for the verbal content of the scenes was tested, using a forced-choice recognition procedure. Analysis of the results showed that memory for surface form and semantic content was better for the immediate test condition. In all conditions, subjects chose more of the nonverbal distractors that were consistent rather than opposite of the emotions viewed. (BL)