The Development Of Emotion Congruent Memory

In recent years, study on the relationship between emotion and cognition is one of the most flourishing fields of cognitive developmental psychology. The emotion congruent memory is a typical phenomenon reflecting the effect of emotion on memory. The previous studies showed the effect of emotion congruent memory with participants of anxiety or depression, also including the participants induced stronger sad or happy state, but study on the developmental characteristics of emotion congruent memory is relatively limited.The associative network model have been examined in the most of previous studies. As the new experimental techniques are improving, the current studies are complicated. The previous theories can not make a reasonable explanation. So a more integrated model need to be constructed to make clear the emotion congruent memory.The emotion congruent encoding was focus of the research. In the pilot study, the emotionality of 590 content words was rated by 613 students. 1350 students from junior middle school participated in the formal experiment. They were induced sad, happy or neutral emotion state with the particular film. The processing strategies of information encoding and the emotion states were manipulated. The relationship between their emotion and memory and its developmental characteristics in different processing strategies were explored.Four studies comprising eight experiments were included in the formal experiment.In study 1, the processing strategies of incidental memorizing and intentional memorizing were manipulated to explore the relationship between their emotion and memory and the developmental characteristics, the memory biases were also compared.In study 2, the perceptual processing and semantic processing strategies were manipulated to examine the relationship between their emotion and memory and the developmental characteristics, the memory biases were also compared.In study 3, participants were required to learn self or other information by using intentional memorizing processing strategy, the relationship between their emotion and memory and developmental characteristics were determined, and their memory biases were compared.Study 4 was similar to study 3 except the incidental memorizing condition.The main results showed as follows,(1) The effect of emotion congruent memory was reliable. Participants in happy states recalled more positive words than negative words, participants in sad states recalled more negative words than positive words, participants in neutral states showed no difference in recalling positive and negative words.(2) Memory biases showed no difference among grades. The similar trend was found in different grades which was not influenced by the different emotion states or processing strategies.(3) Sad or happy emotion can facilitate recalling. The number of words that participants in recalling positive words or negative words was more than in recalling neutral words. And the performance of the participants in sad or happy states was better than the participants in neutral states. The emotional effect was significantly reliable.(4) The total amount of recalling was growing with the grades. Recalling counts in every processing strategy was different in grades. The grade 4 was highest, and the grade 1 was lower.(5) The processing strategy had a reliable effect on emotion congruent memory. The high infusion strategies were used in perceptual processing condition, and also in the processing the self information with incidental memorizing processing strategy. The low infusion strategies were used in intentional memorizing processing, incidental memorizing processing condition, and also in the processing the other information with intentional memorizing processing strategy and incidental memorizing processing strategy.