The Research Of Events Relevance On Directed Forgetting Effect Of Negative Emotional Memory

Researches about emotional memory have been a hot topic in recent years. What wefocused on is not only how to increase our memory, but also forget the unwantedmemories. Generally, directed forgetting paradigm, which most investigators took itas a new way in the area of memory, emphasizes the latter.Directed forgetting was first raised by Muter(1965). Based on this, Bjorkcompleted a range of studies, and then, established the directed forgetting paradigm.The directed forgetting refers to memory performance would be impaired with thepresence of the forgetting instruction. In the typical experiment, participants arepresented with words or pictures, and are instructed to either remember or forget thosewords. Contrary to the forget instruction, however, memory for both forget andremember words is tested afterwards. The basic directed forgetting effect consists of adecrease in memory performance for forget words, combined with a recall advantagefor remembered words.Previous studies have found that the directed forgetting effect of emotionalmaterials is different from neutral ones. In most cases, neutral materials showedsignificant directed forgetting effect, but the results of emotional materials weremixed, even disappeared. However, study on complex emotional events is scarce.Although some studies have found that positive and negative emotion may havedifferent effects on directed forgetting, individuals would rather forget the unpleasant,or even painful memory. Therefore, the present study choose negative emotional eventvideo clips as the material, in order to investigate the impact of different relevancebetween events on directed forgetting.The present study included three experiments, investigating the effect of differentrelevance between events on directed forgetting separately. There were the emotional-relevance, the content-relevance, and the self-relevance. The 2×2 mixed design was used in the present study. We conducted the 2×2 analysis of variance for the threeexperiments separately. The results revealed that emotional-relevance and content-relevance eliminated the directed forgetting effect of negative emotional events. Onlywhen the forget video clips were irrelevant, the memory performance for gist or detailwould have an advantage on the remember ones. Little effects could be found in thefirst two experiments. However, memory for video clips of self-relevance showedsignificant directed forgetting effect, but self-irrelevance did not. On the other hand,the result of memory performance for gist and detail showed significant trade-offeffect.