Can "Immersive" Change The Emotion Memory Trade-off Effects? The Effect Of Involvement Level

Emotional memory trade-off effects,also known as memory narrowing,refers to the phenomenon that when watching scenes with emotional arousal,the memory performances of high arousal items are often improved at the expense of other low arousal scenes.Among them,the items directly related to the emotional center are called central items,while those not directly related to the emotional center are called peripheral details.The memory effect of peripheral items is often damaged with the enhancement of the core content of emotional memory.A large number of studies have shown that this phenomenon can be reduced or disappeared by alleviating the damage of peripheral memory.A few researchers had focused on the role of self-involvement in this process,but the researches’ conclusions had not been unified.From the analysis of the reasons,it could be seen that the main reason for the divergence of the research results might be the inconsistent manipulation of the involvement level.Moreover,the previous researches on the control of involvement level does not conform to the real situation of individual participation in emotional events in daily life.At the same time,the existing researches on the division of emotional memory center items and peripheral details only contains one component,which could not explore the memory performance of different types of center items or peripheral details and the difference of emotional memory trade-off effects changes.To solve the above problems,this study used two kinds of involvement level conditions,subject-performed tasks(SPT)and verbal task(VT),to induce high and low involvement level respectively for the first time.The central items and peripheral details were divided into four types according to visual information,spatial information and action information and they were named by peripheral image details,peripheral position details,center image items and central action items.The role of involvement level in emotional trade-off effects was discussed(Experiment1).Then,by manipulating the consistency of tasks’ goal and emotional center(Experiment 2),we further explored the internal processing mechanism of emotional memory trade-off effects.Two behavioral experiments were conducted in the current study.Experiment 1was designed to investigate the effect of high and low involvement in emotional memory.It was a 2(involvement level: high vs.low)× 2(emotional event: positive vs.negative)mixed design in which the former was a between-subject variable and the latter was within-subject variable.SPT and VT were be used to induce high involvement level and low involvement level.Behind five minutes of mathematical distraction task,both groups were tested for a recognition memory.Through the performances of recognition tasks of four memory components.This experiment explores the influence of different involvement levels on the central item and peripheral detail memory of emotional events,that is,the influence of involvement level on emotional trade-off effects.The results show that:(1)high involvement level could improve the memory performance of negative event peripheral image details.(2)High involvement level could improve the memory performance of the peripheral position details of positive emotional events;(3)High involvement level could improve the memory performance of negative emotional event center image item.(4)High involvement level could improve the memory performance of central action items.(5)High involvement level could improve the performance of central item memory to a certain extent,alleviate the damage of peripheral detail memory in emotional events,and reduce the emotional trade-off effects.After analyzing the results of Experiment 1,we found that the results of the two tasks as the same peripheral details but different components were different.In the peripheral position details recognition task,the positive events were improved under the condition of high involvement,but in the peripheral image details recognition task,only the negative events were improved under the condition of high involvement.However,instead of being improved,positive events had declined.We speculate that this result might be caused by the inconsistency between tasks’ goals and emotional centers.Therefore,we designed experiment 2 to explore the impact of the consistency between tasks’ goals and emotional centers on emotional trade-off effectsThe results show that:(1)the consistency of tasks’ goals and emotional centers could change the memory performance of central items and peripheral details,and affected the size of the trade-off effects.(2)The improvement effect of task goal and emotional center consistency on peripheral position details,central action items and central image items was not affected by involvement level.When tasks’ goals were consistent with emotional center,the central action items and peripheral position details of negative events were promoted.When tasks’ goals and emotional centers were inconsistent,the performance of the tasks’ goals and the emotional center items was not affected by the involvement level,The central image projects of both emotional events have been improved.When the tasks’ goal is inconsistent with the emotional center,the central image items of the two emotional events are improved.(3)The memory performance of peripheral image details is influenced by the consistency and involvement level of tasks’ goals and emotional centers.High involvement level can improve the performance of peripheral image details of negative events when the tasks’ goal is inconsistent with the emotional center,and can also improve the memory performance of peripheral image details of positive events when the tasks’ goal is consistent with the emotional center.To sum up,this study confirmed that high involvement level can improve the memory performance of central items and peripheral details of emotional events,reduce the degree of emotional memory trade-off effects,and provide evidence support for the cue utilization hypothesis.It also explores the role of tasks’ goal and emotional center consistency in the influence of involvement level on emotional trade-off effects,which provides support for the goal-relevance approach and provided a new perspective for alleviating the damage of peripheral detail memory in emotional events.