Emotional Certainty’s Impact On The Judgement Of Learning

Emotional Certainty can affect people’s way of information process. To be morespecific, the certainly emotions lead to heuristic processing, and uncertainty emotionsarouse analytic processing. The judgment of learning (JOL) is a hot research object in thefield of meta-memory. The previous studies have found tht the JOL is influenced byemotional valence. The JOLs under positive emotions are higher than the JOLs undernegative emotions. Meanwhile, researchers found UWP effect in multi-rounds JOLs, thatis to say, the JOLs will decrease as the increase of leaning times. Then how the differentemotions affect JOLs? We conducted four experiments to explore this question. We startedanger, fear, happiness, and surprise using short films. Study1and Study2checked the forspecific emotions’ effect on single-round JOL. Subjects were required give their JOLimmediately after finishing study one pair of words. And after they learned and gave JOLsto all the words, they will take a test. In the Studies3and Study4, subjects completedtwo-round JOLs and tests. We checked the impact from the four emotions on UWP effect.The final results showed that：(1) The angry group’s learning time was significantlylower than the fear group’s learning time. And the learning time of the happy group wassignificantly lower than the surprise group;(2) Within the single-round JOL, the angrygroup’s JOLs were significantly higher than that of the fear group. And the happy group’sJOLs were significantly higher than that of the surprise group, but, without reaching asignificant level;(3) Within the the multi-round JOL, the UWP effects of angry group andhappy group were significant. Even the surprise group also underestimated thesecond-round of test scores, but it did not reach a significant level. Besides, thesecond-round JOL of fear group was not been underestimated;(4) In angry group andhappy group, the relation between the second-round of JOL and the first-round of testscores was significantly greater than the relation between that and second rounds of testscores. Dual processing theory and the MPT hypothesis can explain the above results, andthey can further explain the significance of emotional effect on learning judgment.