P2-33: Influence of Emotional Context on Memory: Deja Vu Made Me Hesitate

Abstract

People store emotionally charged information better than they do neutral information. This is called emotional context enhanced memory. Here, we investigated the influence of emotional facial expression on memory. An emotional identification task (EIT) was adopted to ask participants to identify positive (happy) and negative (sad, fear, and anger) faces. Two versions (version A and version B) of faces randomly selected from the Taiwanese Facial Expression Image Database (Chen and Yen, 2007 Taiwanese Facial Expression Image Database http://bml.ym.edu.tw/∼download/html ). Participants were also divided into two groups which were asked to receive pre-EIT with different versions, respectively. After 8 weeks all participants received a post-EIT with two versions of faces together, which were presented under the order control of counterbalance. The results showed there was no difference between two versions of faces in the pre-EIT. However, participants presented faces slower in the post-EIT than they did in the pre-EIT. After further analysis, we found the slower performance did not come from the interference of different versions showed to participants together in the post-EIT; instead, it came from the memory effect of the pre-EIT. We concluded emotional context affected our memory when we identified facial expressions. Possible causes were also discussed.