The Effect Of Envy On Directed Memory Of Item Memory And Episodic Memory

Envy is a painful emotion that arises when an individual lacks superior qualities,wealth,or achievements of others and desires to have them or wishes the other person to lose them,and it arises from upward social comparison and is a common negative emotion in daily life.The present study was conducted from the perspective of the relationship between envy and active forgetting to investigate whether there are inconsistent responses between item memory and episodic memory directed forgetting under the conditions of information validity of the dominant object and different degrees of affinity of the dominant object,so as to further explore the mechanisms of directed forgetting processing.Experiment 1 used a mixed experimental design of 2(dominant object information validity: positive,negative)× 2(instructions: remember,forget)× 3(groups: acquaintance group,stranger group,control group),where group was a between-subjects variable and the experimental material was item material.The results revealed that only the acquaintance group had no directed forgetting effect when presented with negative information about the dominant object,and the study showed that envy caused individuals to have a cognitive bias,and the higher the degree of envy,the stronger the processing bias for remembered content.Experiment 2 was similar to Experiment 1,using a mixed experimental design of2(dominant object information validity: positive,negative)× 2(instructions:remember,forget)× 3(groups: acquaintance group,stranger group,control group),where group was a between-subjects variable and the experimental material was associative.It was found that no directional forgetting effect was observed in both the acquaintance and stranger groups.The study showed that deep processing under envy strengthens the envy individual’s advantage in encoding information related to the dominant object and is insensitive to forgetting(F)instructions.The following conclusions were drawn: First,envy is influenced by the degree of closeness of the envy object,and individuals are more envy of close objects with direct competition compared to strangers.Second,envy makes directed forgetting less likely,mainly because envy makes it more difficult to ignore TBF items related to the envy object,as a result of the cognitive bias caused by envy.Again,the depth of processing disrupts directed forgetting.Compared with item memory,envy in the situational memory condition eliminates the directed forgetting effect of both positive and negative information about the dominant object for the individual,i.e.,it is caused by the more elaborate processing of situational information,which takes up more cognitive resources and makes insufficient cognitive resources for forgetting processing.Finally,envy individuals’ extraction of negative information about others was more accurate,which was caused by envy individuals’ attentional bias toward dominant others’ negative information.The research aims to provide further additions to the processing mechanisms between envy on cognitive domains,especially between envy and active forgetting,and to provide inspiration for future research on effective forgetting of negative emotions.