Time-dependent effects of discrete post-encoding emotions on item memory and source memory

ABSTRACT

This study examined time-dependent effects of discrete emotions on item and source memory. In Experiment 1, after encoding, participants watched a comic, disgust-inducing, anger-inducing or neutral video at different delays. Positive emotion did not affect item memory but enhanced source memory (only in the 5 min delay). Anger impaired recognition in all delays, but a trend occurred for anger to impair source memory only in the 50 min delay. Disgust did not affect item memory, but a trend emerged for it to enhance and impair source memory in the 5 and 35 min delays, respectively. Experiment 2 showed that positive emotion and disgust had no effect on recognition, and consistent with Experiment 1, positive emotion, not anger or disgust, enhanced source memory. A trend occurred for positive emotion and disgust to impair source memory in the 0 min delay but not in the other delays. Consistent with Experiment 1, Experiment 3 showed that anger impaired both recognition and source memory (for males). Taken together, these findings suggest that the effect of emotion does vary depending on nature of memory tasks, category of emotion, and delay in emotion elicitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• memory consolidation
• item memory
• source memory

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to the following people for their help with data collection: Lingyun Li, Ying Zhang, Changqi Hu, Yiyang Qin, Xinqi Shi, Xuetong Lu, Zhijin Li, Jingwen Yan and Chaoyong Zhao.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Yanju Ren http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8776-8711

Notes

1 We did not use d’ as the dependent variable because, by using the yes/no task, we could not test the two assumptions that must be met for d’ analyses (Stanislaw & Todorov, 1999): (1) The signal and noise distributions are both normal, and (2) the signal and noise distributions have the same standard deviation.

2 The rating of familiarity for the word “实践” (i.e., practice) was lost.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Young Teachers Development Foundation of Central University of Finance and Economics (中央财经大学“青年教师发展基金项目) (No. QJJ1715), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31100736) (国家自然科学基金项目), Shandong Provincial Key Research & Development Program (No. 2018GSF118090) (山东省重点研发计划项目), and Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (No. ZR2017MC058) (山东省自然科学基金项目).