The Influence Of Emotional Valence Intensity On The Self-Reference Effect Of Episodic Memory

Episodic memory is an individual’s memory of personally experienced events that occurred in specific spatiotemporal contexts and can be divided into item memory and source memory.Studies have shown that age-related declines in episodic memory are not only evident in item memory but also pronounced in source memory.Although selfreference encoding as an encoding strategy cannot eliminate memory performance differences between older and younger adults,it can effectively enhance older adults’ performance on episodic memory.Previous research has found that the self-reference effect on memory exists throughout an individual’s lifespan but is influenced by various factors such as emotional information,the form of stimulus material,and experimental paradigms.However,previous research has mainly focused on a single factor and has rarely explored the self-reference effect on memory from a comprehensive perspective.this study therefore selected words and pictures with different emotional valence intensity as experimental materials and used the multi-key task paradigm and selfreference paradigm to investigate the influence of self-reference encoding on episodic memory in younger and older adults.At the same time,this study aims to investigate whether an individual’s memory for encoding conditions is affected by different emotional valence intensities and types of stimulus materials.Study 1 used words with different emotional valence intensity as experimental materials to investigate the item and source memory performance of younger and older adults under self-reference encoding and non-self-reference encoding conditions for different positive emotional valance intensity words(Experiment 1)and negative emotion valance intensity words(Experiment 2).The results showed that for item memory in Experiment 1,both younger and older adults exhibited a self-reference effect on item memory for different positive emotional valance intensity words.For source memory,both younger and older adults exhibited a self-reference effect on source memory only for highly positive words.In Experiment 2,for item memory,younger adults only exhibited a self-reference effect on item memory for neutral words,while older adults did not exhibit a self-reference effect on item memory for different negative emotional valance intensity words.For source memory,both younger and older adults did not exhibit a self-reference effect on source memory for different negative emotional valance intensity words.Study 2 used pictures with different emotional valence intensity as experimental materials to investigate the item and source memory performance of younger and older adults under self-reference encoding and non-self-reference encoding conditions for different positive emotional valance intensity pictures(Experiment 3)and negative emotion valance intensity pictures(Experiment 4).The results showed that for item memory in Experiment 3,younger adults exhibited a self-reference effect on item memory for mildly positive and highly positive pictures,while older adults exhibited a self-reference effect on item memory for neutral and mildly positive pictures.For source memory,both younger and older adults exhibited a self-reference effect on source memory only for highly positive pictures.In Experiment 4,for item memory,younger adults exhibited a self-reference effect on item memory for neutral and highly negative pictures,while older adults did not exhibit a self-reference effect on item memory for different negative emotion valance intensity pictures.For source memory,both younger and older adults exhibited a self-reference effect on source memory for neutral and highly negative pictures.Conclusions:(1)Both younger and older adults demonstrate a self-reference processing advantage in item memory and source memory.Self-reference encoding,as a kind of encoding strategy,can significantly enhance the performance of episodic memory in both young and old adults.(2)Compared with negative emotions,positive emotions are more easily incorporated into the self-concept.Both young and old adults show self-reference effect on episodic memory in words and pictures with different positive emotional valance intensity.(3)Under the influence of stimulus materials types,there are differences in the source memory performance of words and pictures with different negative emotional valance intensity.Both young and old adults exhibit a selfreference effect in highly negative pictures.