Research On The Impacts Of Emotion And Color On Memory

The relationship between emotion and memory is always an important topic in social cognitive neuroscience research, and its relative research results are also considerable. Emotional enhancement effect has been widely verified among these results, which indicates that emotional information partly has a stable impact on enhancing memorizing effect. So it is to be determined whether some other factors have impacted on this effect. Some researchers insist one of the influencing factors is color. Meanwhile, it is found that some colors may connect with positive or negative psychological meanings, and this connection presents regional and cultural difference to some extent. Assuming the stimulus material has different emotional information and color properties simultaneously, whether these emotional information and color properties will affect the memorizing effect of this stimulus material.This study discuss about how emotional information and color properties influence the vocabulary memorizing effect by three experiments in the context of Chinese culture. All these experiments employ learning-recognition experimental paradigm. The first experiment utilizes Chinese double-character emotional words to verify whether these words’emotional information will impact the vocabulary memorizing effect or this influential effect contains gender difference; the second experiment demonstrates vocabularies by three-primary colors(red, green and blue) so as to investigate whether different colors will influence vocabulary memorizing effect or the influential effect includes gender difference; the third experiment aims at verifying how colors and emotional information influence the vocabulary memorizing effect simultaneously and comparing this with the research results abroad about their difference. The experimental research shows that:(1) A better effect appears in memorizing active vocabularies and passive vocabularies than memorizing neutral vocabularies when these vocabularies present only the property of emotional valence message. Meanwhile, girls have a better effect than boys in memorizing emotional words.(2) Demonstrating vocabularies by black color has a better memorizing effect than utilizing red, green or blue; besides, using green color creates a better vocabulary memorizing effect than red or blue. Meanwhile, there is no significant gender difference in color category’s impact on vocabulary memorizing effect.(3) When emotional valence and color category show simultaneously in vocabularies, the vocabulary memorizing effect of this word is better than memorizing a neutral word that presented by black color, regardless of how the colors and emotional valence be matched. Red will enhance the active vocabularies’memorizing effect as well as the passive vocabularies’; green will enhance the memorizing effect of active vocabularies; blue will enhance the memorizing effect of passive vocabularies. It is found after comparison that the color and emotion combined effect on memory demonstrates a localized characteristic regarding to the color of red and blue.