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Emotion and prospective memory: effects of emotional targets and contexts

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Abstract

Event-based prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to perform a delayed and intended action when an event is encountered in the future. Whether emotional targets promote PM performance is still controversial. The reason for these inconsistent findings may be related to the degree of target arousal and context valence (the valence of ongoing task trials) in the previous studies. This study aimed to investigate the separate and combined effects of target valence, arousal, and context valence on event-based PM through two experiments. The results showed that the participants were faster and more accurate in responding to positive, negative, and high-arousal PM targets. Interestingly, an interaction effect of target valence, arousal, and context valence was observed, implying that their individual effects on PM performance cannot be understood in isolation. These findings demonstrate that positive, negative, and high-arousal PM targets can enhance PM performance. In addition, the results provided support for both the emotion enhancement account and the emotion-saliency account, depending upon whether the valence of the PM target matched or did not match the valence of the context. Moreover, context valence can modulate the effect of arousal on PM across different target valences.

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Data and materials are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Editage (www.editage.cn) for English language editing.

Funding

This research was supported by the postgraduate research innovation project in Jiangsu Province (KYCX21_1250).

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Contributions

CX designed the experiment and wrote the whole manuscript text. LZ helped with Investigation, writing-review and editing. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Cong Xin.

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The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

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Ethical approved was granted by the Institutional Review Board of Nanjing Normal University.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual adult participants included in the study.

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Xin, C., Zhang, L. Emotion and prospective memory: effects of emotional targets and contexts. Psychological Research 88, 987–1006 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01903-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01903-y

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