Executive Control Impact On Overgeneralization Of Autobiographical Memory And Emotion

In 1986,Williams first found that the attempted suicide patients tended to have overgeneralization autobiographical memory,this phenomenon has become a new focus in the research of the autobiographical memory recently.In autobiographical memory test,compared with healthy individuals,patients with mood disorders could only retrieve the overgeneralization of memory instead of the specific memories,and then influence the emotional intensity,damage the normal cognitive function.There are two theories explaining the overgeneralized autobiographical memory phenomenon in previous literature.One is the emotion regulation hypothesis,the other is the executive control damage hypothesis.The two theories have been debated intensely due to using different subjects and research methods.Studies based on the two theories inclined to use mood disorders participants rather than the healthy ones,this research have adopted healthy subjects in order to further expand the external validity.There is controversy on the emotional intensity caused by overgeneralized memory.Mnemonic interlock theory claims that the more generalized the memory is,the lower the emotional intensity is(Williams J.M.G.,1996);while the summary-proposition model hold the opposite opinion.Based on the dispute,this study have collected the emotional intensity data for further analyzing.Simply put,this experiment is divided into three parts:the first experiment is to explore whether the healthy individuals with damaged executive control resources will have the overgeneralization phenomenon;the second experiment have added the emotional scale and has better controlled the level of mood,to compare the emotional intensity caused by autobiographical memory;the third experiment further probed the impact of the vision depletion and audial depletion on autobiographical memory generalization and emotional intensity.The results show that:(1)damaged executive control can lead to overgeneralization of autobiographical memory.Compared with the control group,the depleted group have showed significant generalization in autobiographical memory.(2)While the level of mood has not been ruled out,both the different emotional clues and executive control will impact the generalization of autobiographical memory.In the control group,specific memory scores of positive clue words are higher than the negative word clues,and there is no significant difference in the depletion group.(3)While the level of mood has been ruled out,the different damaged executive control affect the specificity of autobiographical memory.Specific memory scores of visual and audial depletion group are significantly lower than the control group.In the different emotional clues,there is no significant difference.(4)In terms of emotional intensity,the lower the specific memory scores are,the lower the emotional intensity is.(5)While the level of mood has been ruled out,the different depleted task will affect the generalization of autobiographical memory.Specific memory score of control group is significantly higher than visual and audial depleted group;there was no significant difference between visual depleted group and audial depleted group;there was no significant difference between different emotional clues words.(6)In terms of emotional intensity,emotional intensity of control group is significantly higher than visual depleted group and audial depleted group;there was no significant difference between visual depleted group and audial depleted group;there was no significant difference between different emotional clues words.