Emotional Arousal and Associative Memory:The Role of Combinatorial Mapping
Previous studies have found that emotional arousal has different effects on associative memory.The object-based framework explains this from the perspective of association type,which believes that emotional arousal will enhance the intra-item associative memory,and will not affect or damage the inter-item associative memory.However,studies which revealed that emotional arousal had different effects on associative memory are not only different in the types of associative memory,but are also different in the combinatorial mapping by reviewing previous studies.In the study of intra-item associative memory,multiple items usually correspond to one source,which is a"many-to-one"mapping,while in the study of inter-item associative memory,one to one item pairs are usually used,which reflects a"one-to-one"mapping.In this study,we intend to investigate whether combinatorial mapping is one of the reasons that emotional arousal has different effects on associative memory.We hypothesize that the influence of emotion on associative memory is not only related to the type of association,but is also related to the combinatorial mapping.To test the above hypothesis,seventy-four participants from Shandong Normal University were recruited.The number of participants was determined by G*power 3.1 software with reference to the effect size standard in previous studies.The experiments were performed in E-prime 2.10.Experiment 1 explored the effect of emotional arousal on intra-item and inter-item associative memory under the condition of"many-to-one"mapping.Experiment 2 investigated the effect of emotional arousal on different types of associative memory when the combinatorial mapping between the items was"one-to-one".Both Experiments 1 and 2 used a 2(emotion type,negative,neutral)x(association type,intra-item,inter-item)mixed experimental design.Participants were randomly assigned to intra-item association group or inter-item association group.In each experiment,three phases were included.During the study phase,participants were instructed to remember the association between the item and its character(for example,color,font,and so on)or the association between the item and background picture.Then,there was a distractor task which required participants to do the simple calculation task for two minutes.During the test phase,participants were instructed to decide whether the item had presented during the study phase first.If participants correctly judged the old items as old,they continued to do the associative recognition in which participants were asked to choose which form of item was presented or picture was presented simultaneously with the item in the study phase.Experiment 1 showed that when the combinatorial mapping was"many-to-one",emotional arousal enhanced the intra-item associative memory and damaged the inter-item associative memory,which was consistent with the prediction of the object-based framework.Experiment 2 found that when the combinatorial mapping was"one-to-one",emotional arousal impaired intra-item associative memory and did not affect inter-item associative memory,which is not consistent with the prediction of the object-based framework.According to the result of two experiments,it can be found that when the combinatorial mapping changed,the influence of emotional arousal on the association memory would change,too.Moreover,the influence of emotional arousal on associative memory was connected with both the type of association and related to the combinatorial mapping.The result showed that although the object-based framework can better explain the different effects of emotion on associative memory,the explanatory power of the theory still had boundary conditions.That is,the effect of emotion on associative memory was influenced by the type of association and the combinatorial mapping.The findings of this study can be used to further improve the theory that explain the different effects of emotion arousal on associative memory.
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