The Influence Of Emotional Context On The Directed Memory And Forgetting Of Neutral Words

Previous researches indicated that emotional context could affect the directed memory and forgetting of neutral items,but the results were still controversial.Researches also showed that emotional context has different effects on the memory of items.Whether to establish a connection between the item and the context(associative encoding,incidental encoding)was one of the reasons for the inconsistent results.In addition,according to context effect,when the test environment was the same as the learning environment,the target information could be recalled better.Only the associative encoding of context and item was considered in the research on the influence of emotional context on the directed memory and forgetting of items,when they were incidental encoded,how emotional context affected the directed memory and forgetting of items had not been experimentally verified.Studies on the influence of emotional context on the directed memory and forgetting only presented context in learning phase,and it had not been verified whether the presentation of emotional context in test phase was also more conducive to the recognition of item.To solve the above problems,Experiment 1 and experiment 2 were designed to explore the influence of emotional context on words’ directed memory and forgetting under different ways of encoding(associative encoding,incidental encoding).On the basis of the first two experiments,experiment 3 and experiment 4 presented the emotional context in test phase to explore the influence of emotional context on words’ directed memory and forgetting.180 emotional pictures were selected from International Affective Picture System,and 360 Chinese two-character words were selected from Modern Chinese Word Frequency Dictionary as experimental materials,and college students were the participants.The independent variables were the valance of the pictures(positive,neutral and negative)and the cue(remember,forget),the dependent variable was the recognition correct rate of words.The results found that:(1)When item and context were associative encoding and there was no context in test phase,emotional context could affect the directed memory and forgetting of words,which was mainly reflected in the fact that the recognition correct rate was lower for TBR items encoded in emotional contexts relative to those encoded in neutral contexts,and there was no significant difference in the recognition correct rate of TBF items encoded in three emotional contexts;(2)When item and context were incidental encoding and there was no context in test phase,emotional context could not affect the directed memory and forgetting of words;(3)When item and context were associative encoding and the context was presented in test phase,emotional context could not affect the directed memory and forgetting of words;(4)When item and context were incidental encoding and the context was presented in test phase,negative context had an impact on the directed memory and forgetting of words,the recognition correct rate was lower for TBF items encoded in neutral contexts relative to those encoded in negative contexts,there was no significant difference in the recognition correct rate of TBR items encoded in three emotional contexts;(5)No matter how the item and context were encoded,the recognition correct rate of words with context in test phase was significantly higher than that without context in test phase.When item and context were associative encoding and the context was presented in test phase,the recognition correct rate of items encoded in positive and negative context was significantly higher than that in test phase without context.In conclusion,these results demonstrated that:(1)When item and context were associative encoding and there was no context in test phase,emotional context could affect the selective rehearsal of TBR items,making TBR items in emotional context more difficult to remember than those in neutral context,and the memory of TBF items was not affected by emotional context.(2)When item and context were incidental encoding,negative context could affect the retrieval inhibition of TBF items,making TBF items in negative context more difficult to forget than those in neutral context,and the memory for TBR items was not affected by emotional context.(3)When the same emotional context was presented in test phase,the recognition correct rate of words was significantly higher than the case without context in test phase,and it was independent of the encoding way.