Department of Psychology, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, South Carolina 29424, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2012 Dec;19(6):1165-71. doi: 10.3758/s13423-012-0301-3.
The emotionally enhanced memory effect is robust across studies of retrospective memory, with heightened recall for items with emotional content (e.g., words like "murder") relative to neutral items (e.g., words like "envelope"). Only a handful of studies have examined the influence of emotion on prospective memory (PM), with mixed results. In some cases emotion enhances PM, and in others it impairs PM. Interpretation of these findings is clouded by methodological differences across studies and by the fact that, to date, no study has examined the impact of emotion on PM monitoring. In our study, we assessed PM performance when PM targets were neutral, negative, and positive, and also investigated monitoring across these different PM target types. Participants showed heightened PM performance for positive and negative relative to neutral targets, yet there was no evidence of additional monitoring for emotional targets. In fact, measures of monitoring were significantly reduced when the PM targets were emotional rather than neutral. Our findings suggest that it is possible to boost PM performance in a focal task using emotional cues, and that the use of emotional cues reduces the need for monitoring.
情绪增强记忆效应在回溯记忆的研究中是稳健的，与中性项目（如“信封”）相比，具有情绪内容的项目（如“谋杀”）的回忆会增强。只有少数几项研究考察了情绪对前瞻性记忆 (PM) 的影响，结果喜忧参半。在某些情况下，情绪会增强 PM，而在其他情况下，情绪会损害 PM。这些发现的解释受到研究之间方法差异的影响，并且到目前为止，没有研究考察情绪对 PM 监控的影响。在我们的研究中，我们评估了 PM 目标为中性、负性和正性时的 PM 表现，并且还研究了不同 PM 目标类型之间的监控。与中性目标相比，参与者在正性和负性目标上表现出更高的 PM 表现，但对于情绪目标没有额外监控的证据。事实上，当 PM 目标是情绪而不是中性时，监控措施显著降低。我们的研究结果表明，使用情绪线索有可能提高焦点任务中的 PM 表现，并且使用情绪线索减少了监控的需要。
