The Effect Of Self-esteem And Emotion On Working Memory Of Personality And Emotional Information

Cognitive, personality and emotions are three major areas of psychological research, today's psychological research explore them respectively, but as a whole mental activity these three all very important they are interaction and mutual influence with each other. Personality and mood affect both the process and content of cognitive. Self is an important aspect of personality, it has a special motivation and emotional effect, working memory is a very important aspect of cognitive processes, it plays a very important role on complexity cognitive procession, such as learning, thinking and problem solving. Previous studies have demonstrated that self and emotions has some effect on working memory.According to the relationship between information and the main ego state, we can divide information into two categories:one is the individual information about ourselves, such as personality adjective and emotional words, it has something with the main ego state; the other is general information, such as common words, it has nothing to do with the main ego state. According to the different materials can divide working memory into individual information (personal words and emotional words) working memory and general information (general words) working memory. Most of the current study is about the general information, and little is about individual information.In this study, we use both of these information as material to working memory span test, in order to find the laws. The study has the following two purposes, one is a compare the law of different materials (general information and subject information); the other is to explore the affection of self status on the individual information working memory, these factors include the nature of the material like potency of such words (positive, negative) and the reference target when memory the words (self, others, none), and the self-esteem and emotional state of the subjects.Based on the above purposes, after the theory and research been reviewed, we selected college students as subjects randomly, and divide them into small groups. The whole process is divided into two parts of preliminary experiments and formal experiments. The purpose of preliminary experiments is to select the material which is required in formal experimental, which is three different terms. In the formal experiment, subjects must complete two questionnaires the Self-Worth Scale and the Profile of Mood State (POMS) first, and then randomly divided subjects into two group, one group in the experimentⅠand experimentⅡ, another Group in the experimentⅠand experimentⅢ. Through the process we use 2×3×2×2×2×3 mixed design of 6 factors, in which mood and self-esteem are measure variables, speech valence and the anchoring conditions are variables within subjects, materials and feedback conditions are variables between subjects.Through the collation and analysis of experimental data, we draw the following conclusions:1. There exists a phenomena that individual is more likely to remember the individual information, that is if the information related to individual's self status it's working memory will better than general information it has nothing to do with one's self state.2. That the positive information working memory is much better than the negative information. And when the reference target is self, the individual will do better on the working memory, and this is self-reference effect3. Self-esteem had some influence on individual information working memory. Individuals with high self-esteem will remember more positive information than negative information, but individuals with low self-esteem there is no such different. On the positive information remember individuals with high self-esteem do much better than individuals with low self-esteem, and these two did almost same in negative information working memory. 4. The individual's current mental state also had some influence on working memory. If the information is consistent with the individual's current mood state he will remember better, showed out the mood congruency effect. That is individuals with positive mood state will remember more positive information; Individuals with negative mood state will remember more negative information.5. Arousing emotion have selectively affect the individuals with low self-esteem and the individuals with positive mood state, leading to the decline in working memory span for both of them.