Effects Of Encoding And Emotional State On Intentional Forgetting Of Source Memory

Research shows that the key to successful extraction of episodic memory is the source memory.(Guo,Duan,Li,&Paller,2006).There is no consistent conclusion as to what factors could affect the source memory.Previous studies can not effectively solve the factors that what could affect the source memory in the process of forgetting.Based on the conclusions of previous studies and their shortcomings,this study aims to explore the effects of encoding and emotional states on the intentional forgetting of source memory through two experiments.Experiment 1 explored the effect of encoding on intentional forgetting of source memory.This study selected 75 college students as the subject group,Experiment 1 adopted a mixed experimental design of 2(processing instruction: memory / forgetting)× 2(encoding mode: intentional encoding / unintentional encoding)× 2(word list : list 1 / list 2).Encoding and processing instructions were inter-group variables and word list tables are intra-group variables.The experimental results showed that there is no significant difference between the memory group and the forgetting group in source recognition performance,regardless of whether the background information is encoded intentionally or unintentionally.In experiment 2,after learning the participants were investigated by inducing different emotional stations to explore the effects of emotional states on intentional forgetting of source memory.This study selected 117 college students as the subject group,At the end of the study,the participants were asked to watch videos to induce different emotional states.Experiment 2 adopted a mixed experimental design of 3(emotion type: positive / neutral / negative)× 2(processing instruction: remember / forgetting)× 2(word list : list 1 / list 2),in which emotional type and processing instruction were inter-group variables and list tables were intra-group variables.The results showed that the interaction between emotional type and processing instruction was significant,showed that in the negative emotion group,the result of source recognition in remembering group was significantly higher than that in forgetting group,but there was no significant difference between positive group and neutral group.The present study finds that,first,encoding has no effect on the intentional forgetting of the source memory,that is,within 1-2 seconds of the initial presentation of the project,the background of the project is automatically processed by the individual.which supports the "one-shot" theory;Second,different emotions have different effects on the intentional forgetting on the source memory,as shown in the negative emotion group,the emotion only promoted the item memory,but at the cost of weakening the source memory.The difference between memory group and forgetting group was significant,but there was no significant difference between positive group and neutral group.