The Effect Of Emotional Arousal On The Item-background Associative Memory

We saved most of our daily life events as the form of episode memory made of all kinds of details. The specific recall of one event always accomplished by retrieving much information from which could be stored in many different ways, some information was strongly bound together, yet some other was distinguishingly stored alone. As a result, some information can be retrieved easily with its relevant information, and the others can’t. Emotion is an very important one of the many explanations for such phenomenon above. Numerous researches have found that the emotionality can improve the memory of the information but impair the memory of the non-emotional information. Researchers also found that emotionality cause differences not only to the memory but also to the binding of the information.The research on the emotional memory is a hotspot of current psychology, and many researchers have started to study the effect of emotional on associative memory. Some researches were conducted by using words or pictures which brought out more question. One of them is the emotionality of the backgrounds in the complex episode pictures which are behind the emotional items. We tried to control the emotionality and the encoding of the backgrounds so that we can acquire more theoretical and data support.This research includes three experiments, aim to study the associative memory of items and backgrounds with different emotionality or familiarity. The experiment 1 use a 2(arousal of items: negative or neutral)×2(arousal of backgrounds: negative or neutral) within-subjects design,the experiment 2 use a(arousal of items: negative or neutral)×2(arousal of backgrounds: negative or neutral)×2(preexposure of backgrounds: yes or no) within- subjects design, the experiment 3 use a 2(arousal of items: negative or neutral)×2(arousal of backgrounds: negative or neutral)×2(time of background presentation: 3s or 5s), the recognition of items and the associative recognition of items-backgrounds being the dependent variable. We concluded that:First, emotion can enhance the memory of items and backgrounds but inhibited the item-background associative memory. The item-background pairs with emotion involved had significantly lower correct associative recognition rate than that of neutral item-background pairs.Second, the effect emotion caused on item-background associative memory can only be impaired by the familiarity of backgrounds but cannot be eliminated.Third, by presenting the background firstly and extended we can enhance the association of the emotional information but still we cannot eliminate the negative influence caused by emotion. We can conclude that the effect of emotion on item-background associative memory exists not just in the encoding phase..