The Effect Of Negative Emotions And Delays On Prospective Memory In Middle School Students

Prospective memory is an individual’s memory of something to be performed in the future.Good or bad prospective memory can directly or indirectly affect the learning and life of middle school students.Negative emotions can damage prospective memory,and negative emotions are influenced by cognitive resources,while delay may affect the allocation of cognitive resources.Therefore,it can be inferred that delay will affect the prospective memory of negative emotions,that is,delaying the elimination of the interference of negative emotions on prospective memory.In the past,there has been little exploration of the combined effects of emotion and delay on prospective memory.Therefore,this study investigates the effects of negative emotions and delay on prospective memory in middle school students through two experiments.Experiment 1 adopts 2(emotional valence: negative,neutral)× A mixed experimental design of 3(delay setting: no delay,short delay,long delay)was conducted to explore the impact of negative emotions on prospective memory in middle school students,and further explore the impact of delay on prospective memory of negative emotions in middle school students.Specifically,whether adding time delay to the ongoing task can eliminate the interference effect of negative emotions on prospective memory was also explored.Due to the use of 2-back tasks in the ongoing task,the cognitive load for middle school students was still too high,Therefore,no significant difference was found between negative emotional prospective memory and neutral emotional prospective memory under the long delay setting.For this purpose,Experiment 2 controlled for the variable of cognitive load.The ongoing task used a 1-back task,while still using 2(emotional valence:negative,neutral)× A mixed experimental design of 3(delay setting: no delay,short delay,long delay)was conducted to further explore the impact of negative emotions and delay on prospective memory after controlling cognitive load.This study concludes that:(1)prospective memory performance under negative emotions is better than that under neutral emotions.(2)Under the condition of attentional resource overload,the time delay is added to the task in progress.At this time,the task in progress has been completed,and the attention resources provided by the extra delay are more invested in the prospective memory task,which improves the memory performance of prospective memory(3)Cognitive resources can affect prospective memory performance.