The Effect Of Emotion Picture 's Potency And Awakening On Source Memory

Episodic memory, referring to memory for an event or episode that occurs at a certain time and a certain place, includes two elements:item memory and source memory. Item memory refers to recognition or recall of previously presented information itself, whereas source memory refers to recollection or recall of the context from which the fact or information is acquired.Source memory is usually divided into associative source memory and organizational source memory.Among the oldest psychological intuitions is that emotion enhances memory,and indeed much evidence now supports this hypothesis.Lots of studies demonstrate that recall and recognitions is more likely for emotional than for neutral items. For instance,studies of flashbulb memories indicate that emotional real-life events compared to mundane events are reexperienced with a greater sense of recollection, vividness,confidence, and a greater belief in accurancy.There have been more and more evidences showing the dissociation between item memory and source memory. However, studies investigating the effects of emotion on memory for contextual details have yielded mixed results.-Some studies find emotion to enhance memory for contextual details, while others fail to show this effect, or even report emotion to impair memory for contextual details.Two basic dimensions of emotion are arousal and valence:Arousal describes how exciting or calming a stimulus is, whereas valence describes how positive or negative it is. Our understanding of how emotion enhances memory relies on the currently disputed effects of these factors.Current theories such as Nairne largely attribute emotional memory enhancement to arousal. The underlying assumption is that our limited memorial resources are preferentially allocated to behaviorally significant stimuli, with arousal acting as a primary index of behavioral significance. In contrast, negative category theory is that people will automatically evaluate the stimulus from the environment, and various of events can be easily divided into two classes,positive one and negative one. Negative stimulation, which is more important to survive can cause more attention of people. Although not all negative stimulus can threat to survival, but in the long term evolution is easy to form a mechanism:for all are more sensitive to negative stimuli. Thus valence is hypothesized to exert a main influence on memory.In the present research,120 assessed affective pictures were used as stimulus materials, armed at examing the effection on source memory of affective pictures varies from different valences and arousal, which are 20 low arousal negative pictures, 20 low arousal positive pictures,20 high arousal negative pictures and 20 high arousal positive pictures.Experiment 1 examined the different source memory among affective pictures. Participants learned affective pictures with different valence,half of the pictures accured on the left side of the screen while the other half accured on the right. In subsequent tests, they were first asked to determine whether a picture had been presented or not during the initial learning phase and, then they were further asked to recall the location in which the picture was initially presented. Arousal factor was added to experiment 2, as the neutral pictures were all non-arousal,we used positive pictures and negative pictures only. In experiment 3,arousal was the only factor to be examined, in addition, source type was changed from location memory to colour memory.The study yielded the following findings. First, location memory was significantly better for emotional pictures than for neutral pictures, indicated the enhanced effect of emotional stimulation of location source memory.Second, rather than valence it is arousal that enhances the location source memory. No matter positive or negative pictures, the recognition accuracy of high arousal pictures and source location accuracy is significantly higher than low arousal pictures.Third,there was no significant difference between location source memory and colour source memory for pictures material,the recognition accuracy of high arousal pictures and source color accuracy is significantly higher than low arousal pictures.The disassiociation effect between item memory and source memory was appeared in experiment 2 and 3.Arousal-enhanced source memory for affective pictures occurred both when item memory for that picture was good (hits) and when it was poor (misses).Above all, use emotional pictures as study material, we found that the emotional stimulation can increase location source memory and color source memory. Compared with the titer, arousal is the main factors influencing the source memory. This study verifies the separation of item memory and source memory. Arousal-enhanced source memory for affective pictures occurred both when item memory for that picture was good (hits) and when it was poor (misses).