The Research Of Negative Mood Congruent Effect Of Prospective Memory

Prospective memory is anindispensable part of human’s daily life, and human emotion plays on a very important role for us, so how the emotion impacting on all aspects of humanity has become one of the key research topics for scholars. About the studies of the relationship between prospective memory and emotion, most scholars mainly study positive emotions and negative emotions impacting on prospective memory, and the results indeed proved that emotion significantly affect prospective memory. But there are only two studies about it. It is still in the primary stage of exploration. Therefore, this study increases two additional levels of different emotions(low sadness, highsadness) on the basis of previous studies, to further explore that under two different emotions background, whether the prospective memory exists emotional consistency and whether it would be impacted by different levels of emotion.This study belongs to double levels of single factor between-subjects experimental design, and uses a classic methodology of prospective memory---dual-task paradigm. First, we used video to induced subjects’ emotions, then presented them the material consistent or inconsistent with memory, at last, asked them to perform recognition or recall. If the prospective memory test scores in consistent with memory material and emotional stateare significantly higher than scores in inconsistent with memory material and emotional, the prospective memory exists emotional consistency, on the contrary, it is the opposite. The emotional background are two different levels of negative emotions: low sadness and highsadness, and prospective memory tasks material is divided into three types of emotional state: positive emotions, neutral and negative emotion. Therefore, there are six groups(21 people in each group)of subjects: low sad sadnesspositive emotions group, low sadness- neutral emotions group, low sadness- negative emotions group, high sadness- positive emotions group, high sadness- neutral emotions group and high sadness- negative emotions group in this study. The independent variable in this experiment is consistency between emotional background and emotional state of prospective memory tasks material, and the dependent variable is hit rate of prospective task and the current task performance.The research conclusions are as follows:(1) Under the background of sadness, prospective memory exists emotional consistency reverse effect.(2) Prospective Memory’s emotional consistency reverse effect is not affected by the intensity of sadness. Both at the height of sadness and at the low of sadness, prospective memory always exist signs of emotional consistency reverse effect.(3) At high and low sad sadness background, the current task achievement and the prospectivetask achievement have appeared the phenomenon that one grows but the other decline.