Emotional State On Vocabulary Learning And Recognition

A variety of studies show that the process of studying and memorizing is influenced by the present emotion. Two memory effects relevant to the influence are called mood dependent memory(MDM effect) and mood congruent memory(MCM effect). The first is a phenomenon in which emotional material is remembered more reliably in moods that match the emotional content of the memories. The latter is the facilitation of memory when mood at retrieval is matched to mood at encoding (Lewis, 2003) . More behavioral experiments have been made about the influence of emotion on studying and memory, whereas, its underlying neurophysiolo-gical mechanisms are still unkown.Therefore, Using event-related potentials(ERPs) technique, we investigate the electrophysiological mechanisms of learning and recognizing Chinese double characters in 14 female subjects who are evoked certain emotion by watching pictures. Within-subjects design is used in the experiment. The within-subjects factors involve consistency (2), emotion(2), valence (3) and electrode(21) which includes all the electrodes involved in the later statistics. The stimuli are Chinese double characters. The experiment comprises two phases which are study and recognition. Before each phase, subjects watch emotional pictures to evoke pleasant or unpleasant emotion. In study phase, subjects judge the pleasantness of words presented on the computer screen, while in following recognition phase, they judge whether the words are presented in previous study phase.The ERP data show that evoked emotions cause significant effect on ERP evoked by "old" judgement. In recognition phase, a significant interaction between consistency and electrodes is found, especially for P250, N400, LPC3. A further simple effect suggests that the effect of consistency is clear mainly in prefrontal lobe, central areas, and posterior cortex, consistent condition causes more positive wave than inconsistent condition. Furthermore, the findings also suggest that there is no interaction between word valence and mood consistency.At study, the results suggest a significant MCM effect on ERPs which is especially apparent in N750. The amplitude is higher for pleasant emotion than for unpleasant emotion and MCM effect is apparent in occipital lobe when studying pleasant words. For unpleasant words, on the other hand, the amplitude is as opposite as the pleasant condition, and MCM effect appears in most of the brain.