Emotion-Evoked Bias On Temporal Position Memory:the Effects Of Valence,Arousal,and Affective Spillover

Our impressive episodic memories are usually composed with emotion and distorted temporal memory,raising the question of how emotion may impact on the encoding and storing of temporal information.A rising studies focusing on timeemotion interactions shed a light on the question,however,most of them concentrated on temporal order and duration memories.Here,we set out to explore the effect of emotion on temporal position memory,discussing the role of valence and arousal together,while moving forward to the affective spillover effect.A pilot study and three formal experiments were contained in the dissertation.In the pilot study,the serial presentation method used in the formal experiments was examined.In Experiment 1,the effect of emotion on temporal position memory was tested by using standard emotional(negative/neutral/positive)pictures.In Experiment2,the role of valence and arousal as well as their potential interactions with each other was tested using emotional pictures divided by valence(negative/positive)and arousal(high/low).In Experiment 3,we examined the affective spillover effect on the temporal position memory of the neutral pictures by asking participants to watch emotional(negative/neutral/positive)video clips before presenting pictures.For Experiment 2 and Experiment 3,BIOPAC MP150 was used to record participants’ skin conduction level(SCL)and heart rate(HR)during the test as the objective indicators of physical arousal and attentional input,respectively.Here come the results.First,a recalling bias was found for negative pictures as subjects tended to estimate their temporal position earlier than neutral and positive ones.Second,the temporal position memory bias was caused by valence with high arousal can reduce the bias to some extent.Third,the affective spillover caused by strong negative emotion can also lead to an earlier estimation bias on temporal position memory for the neutral pictures.To sum up,a steady earlier estimation bias for temporal position memory can be evoked by both the negative item itself and affective spillover caused by negative stimuli which may serve as an avoid-motivated behavior.Interestingly,high arousal can reduce the impact of valence which may be correlated with the attention allocation mechanisms illustrated in the arousal-biased competition model.Future studies should explore the underlying mechanisms for those effects we found here and look for their clinical applications.