内容与自我关联性对负性情绪记忆定向遗忘的影响

Effect of Events and Self-relevance on Directed Forgetting of Negative Emotional Memory

本研究使用负性情绪视频片段作为实验材料,采用词表法定向遗忘范式,用2个实验分别考察了内容与自我关联性对负性情绪要义和细节记忆的定向遗忘及其权衡的影响。研究结果表明:(1)材料内容上的关联性没有导致定向遗忘的出现。在内容关联条件下,遗忘提示只增加了要义记忆没有增加细节记忆;(2)自我关联性导致了对负性情绪记忆的定向遗忘,表现为遗忘组的回忆成绩低于记住组;(3)关联性对细节和要义记忆有不同的影响,自我关联性使得被试的细节回忆率更高,但要义回忆率却更低,表现出明显的要义-细节权衡。

Nowadays researchers focus not only on how to improve our memory, but also on how to forget the unwanted memory by usinga directed forgetting paradigm. In the typical directed forgetting paradigm, participants are presented with words, and are instructed ei-ther to remember or to forget these words or pictures ; subsequently participants are asked to recall or recognize both to - be - forgottenwords （ F words） and to - be - remembered words （ R words）. The basic directed forgetting effect consists of a decrease in memory per-formance for the to - be - forgotten words, combined with a recall advantage for the to - be - remembered words. Some researchers investigated the forgetting of negative emotional memory by using the directed forgetting paradigm, but the resultsfrom directed forgetting of emotional memory were mixed. Furthermore, most previous researches on directed forgetting of emotionalmemory used words and pictures rather than complex emotional events as experimental materials. Therefore, we tried to use negative e-motional videos, which are rich in more complex emotional information and more similar to our real life events as experimental materi-als. Meanwhile, the materials used in the previous directed forgetting studies are often irrelevant to each other. As is well known, ifthere was relevance between the materials, participants were more likely to process them as a whole, which would prevent directed for-getting. Therefore, we used the list method of directed forgetting paradigm to investigate the impact of content - relevance of negative e-motional events and self- relevance of negative emotional events on directed forgetting. In the present study, we conducted a 2 x 2 mixed designs in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, we examined the effect of contentrelevance between the negative emotional events on directed tbrgetting; moreover, we analyzed the overall memory, gist memory and de-tail memory of negative emotional videos separately. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the content - relevance of events eliminatedthe directed forgetting, but when content was highly related between events, memory of gist and detail of to - be - remembered negativeemotional events enhanced. In Experiment 2, we examined the effect of self - relevance on directed forgetting of negative emotionalmemory, which found self - relevance resulted in the directed forgetting of negative emotion, namely directed forgetting appeared underthe self - relevance condition, but disappeared under the self - irrelevance condition. Especially in Experiment 2, we found self - rele-vance took different roles in gist memory and detail memory, namely self - relevance enhanced detail memory, but decreased gist memo-ry, which showed significant gist/detail trade - off effect. In conclusion, the results revealed that content -relevance of events eliminated the directed forgetting effect. However, self- rele-vance of events showed a significant directed forgetting effect, but self - irrelevance of events did not. Memory performance for gistmemory and detail memory had a significant gist/detail trade - off effect.