| There is a trade-off effect in emotional memory in which emotion enhances the memory of the central emotional content,but weakens the memory of background information and related information between items.Previous research have shown that temporal order information in memory,as one of the elements of inter-item association,is vulnerable to the debilitating effects of emotion.However,the enhancement of emotion for temporal order memory was found in a few studies that used stimuli with a storyline or involved narrative encoding.These results imply that narrative encoding may have protected the temporal order information from the interference of emotion.To investigate this question,the present research will use a series of studies to investigate whether and how emotion and encoding styles interact with temporal order memory.This thesis consists of a pre-experiment and three formal experiments.The purpose of the pre-experiment is to explore suitable and effective methods of manipulating the coding method,so as to provide a smooth development of the subsequent research.In Experiment 1,participants were randomly divided into two groups and asked to encode pictures of three emotional types(positive,neutral,and negative)using different encoding methods(narrative and discrete encoding),followed by a relative recency judgment task to measure temporal order memory and explore the effects of emotion and encoding method on temporal order memory of pictures.Experiment 2 had a similar experimental design to Experiment 1,using two emotional types of word stimuli(neutral and negative)to explore the effects of emotion and encoding style on temporal order memory for words.Experiment 3 further created word sequences with different coherence(high and low coherence)of word emotion types of stimulus material(neutral and negative)for narrative coding and explored whether the above narrative coding effects were dependent on inter-item coherence.The experimental results found that(1)In Experiment 1,it was first found that temporal order memory of pictures was significantly worse in the negative emotion condition compared to the positive emotion and neutral condition,indicating that negative emotion would have some weakening effect on temporal order memory.Next,the temporal order memory of pictures in the narrative coding group was significantly better than that in the discrete coding group,i.e.,narrative coding could enhance temporal order memory;more importantly,narrative coding could moderate the weakening effect of negative emotions,as shown by the fact that the temporal order memory of pictures in the negative emotion condition was significantly lower than that in the positive and neutral conditions in the discrete coding group,whereas there was no significant difference in the temporal order memory in the three emotion conditions in the narrative coding group.(2)In Experiment 2,the same enhancement effect of narrative coding on temporal order memory was found,i.e.,word temporal order memory was significantly better in the narrative coding group than in the discrete coding group.Moreover,narrative coding protected word temporal order memory from the weakening effect of negative emotions,as shown by the fact that in the discrete coding group,negative emotions weakened word temporal order memory,whereas in the narrative coding group,there was no significant difference between word temporal order memory in the two emotional conditions.(3)In Experiment 3,inter-item coherence affected temporal order memory,i.e.,temporal order memory was significantly better in the high coherence condition than in the low coherence condition.Importantly,the protective effect of narrative coding on temporal order memory depended on inter-item coherence,as shown by the fact that in the low coherence condition,negative emotions continued to weaken temporal order memory despite participants’ use of narrative coding;in the high coherence condition,there was no significant difference in temporal order memory between the two emotional conditions.The above findings suggest that temporal order information,as a linking element between items,can be weakened by negative emotions,while narrative coding strategy can enhance temporal order memory by enhancing the linkage between items and protect temporal order memory from negative emotions,and it is worth noting that narrative coding can only play its role when there is some coherence between items.This finding provides a possible explanation for the controversy over emotional temporal order memory in previous studies and provides empirical support for the development of new methods to reduce temporal order memory impairment. |
