The Effect Of Emotional Arousal On Associative Memory Of Neutral Information

Previous studies have mostly used materials that are emotional in nature to explore the effect of emotion on associative memory.Emotional arousal was not separated from memory information to be tested.Emotional items were more likely to capture maintenance attention than neutral items.Thus most studies are not able to point whether memory impairments occur due to a deficit in memory,or a specific deficit in emotional memory,or even due to attention deficits;nor they are able to point on the mechanism underlying these deficits.Our study uses the form of emotional arousal and memory material to study the relationship between emotional arousal and memory materials.The neutral pairs of words which are not emotional are used as memory materials and the neutral picture or emotional picture is presented after the pair of words to manipulate the emotional arousal to explore the influence of emotion on the associative memory of neutral pairs of words.According to Arousal-Biased Competition,emotion enhances high-priority item memory and weakens low-priority item memory,which is composed of goal relevant and perceptually salient.Does emotion have the same effect on associative memory with different priorities? The levels of unitization framework assumes that emotion can promote associative memory between two separate items under conditions in which the pair of items will be encoded as a single unit.What is the effect of semantic relevance and goal relevant on the influence of emotion on the associative memory of neutral information? The influence of perceptually salient and encoding strategy on the influence of emotion on neutral information association memory is unknown.Therefore,this research aimed at exploring how emotional arousal on associative memory,even if neither of the competing stimuli is inherently emotional.as well as attention priority(goal relevant and perceptually salient),goal relevant and integration(semantic correlation).perceptually salient and integration(encoding strategy)constrain the influence of emotion on neutral information association memory.Experiment 1 was a three-factor mixed experiment design of 2(goal relevant: high,low)× 2(perceptually salient: prominent,not prominent)× 2(emotion type: neutral,negative).perceptually salient and emotion types were the variables within-subject,goal relevant were between-subject.while in experiment 2,there were two(goal relevant: high,low)× 2(semantic relevance: relevance,irrelevance)× 2(emotion type: neutral,negative).,goal relevant were between-subject,the semantic relevance and emotion type were within-subject.in experiment 3,it was 2(encoding strategy: integrative,nonintegrative)× 2(perceptually salient: prominent,not prominent)× 2(emotion type: neutral,negative),in which the encoding strategy is between-subject,and the perceptually salient and emotional types are the variables within-subjects.We concluded that:(1).Emotional type weakens the associative memory of neutral information.(2).Goal relevant and perceptually salient can not constraint the weakening effect of emotion on neutral information associative memory.(3).Integration(semantic relevance and encoding strategy)would constraint the weakening effect of emotion on neutral information associative memory.(4).Compared with perceptually salient,encoding strategy play a more important role in constraint the weakening effect of emotion on neutral information associative memory.