Electrophysiological Correlates of Emotional Source Memory in High-Trait-Anxiety Individuals

Abstract

The interaction between recognition memory and emotion has become a research hotspot in recent years. Dual process theory posits that familiarity and recollection are two separate processes contributing to recognition memory, but further experimental evidence is needed. The present study explored the emotional context effects on successful and unsuccessful source retrieval amongst 15 high-trait-anxiety college students by using event-related potentials (ERPs) measurement. During study, a happy, fearful, or neutral face picture first was displayed, then a Chinese word was superimposed centrally on the picture and subjects were asked to remember the word and the corresponding type of picture. During the test participants were instructed to press one of four buttons to indicate whether the displayed word was an old or new word. And then, for the old word, indicate whether it had been shown with a fearful, happy, or neutral face during the study. ERPs were generally more positive for remembered words than for new words and the ERP difference was termed as an old/new effect. It was found that, for successful source retrieval (it meant both the item and the source were remembered accurately) between 500 and 700 ms (corresponding to a late positive component, LPC), there were significant old/new effects in all contexts. However, for unsuccessful source retrieval (it meant the correct recognition of old items matched with incorrect source attribution), there were no significant old/new effects in happy and neutral contexts, though significant old/new effects were observed in the fearful context. Between 700 and 1200 ms (corresponding to a late slow wave, LSW), there were significant old/new effects for successful source retrieval in happy and neutral contexts. However, in the fearful context, the old/new effects were reversed, ERPs were more negative for successful source retrieval compared to correct rejections. Moreover, there were significant emotion effects for successful source retrieval at this time window. Further analysis showed ERPs of old items were more negative in fearful context than in neutral context. The results showed that early unsuccessful fearful source retrieval processes (related to familiarity) were enhanced, but late successful fearful source retrieval processes during source retrieval monitoring (related to recollection) were weakened. This provided preliminary evidence for the dual processing theory.

Happy emotion cognition of bimodal audiovisual stimuli optimizes the performance of the P300 speller

“…Some studies suggested that the P600, with a more frontal–central distribution between 500 and 600 ms, is associated with recollection (Duarte, Ranganath, Winward, Hayward, & Knight, ; MacKenzie & Donaldson, ; Speer & Curran, ). One study on emotional source memories found that the P600 amplitude increased when subjects showed an enhanced memory bias for emotion information related to source familiarity (Cui, Shi, et al, ). In our study, we selected six smiling face and chuckle pairs from male and female individuals of three different age groups.…”

Detrimental and Beneficial Effects in Ongoing and Lasting Collaborative Memory: Insight From the Emotional Timeout Procedure

“…However, for source memory, the current study merely found reliable error pruning during ongoing collaboration. This difference indicates that the recollection process is not equally involved in the two subtypes of episodic memory, providing telling evidence for the dual-process models (Bell et al, 2017;Cox & Shiffrin, 2017;Cui et al, 2016;Lacot et al, 2017;Ritchey et al, 2018;Sun et al, 2018;Ye et al, 2019;Yu et al, 2018). By contrast, previous studies had revealed stable error pruning in both item memory and source memory tasks .…”

“…There are two types of models, dual-process and single-process, describing the relationship between these two subtypes of episodic memory. The dual-process models propose two dissociated processes underpinning episodic memory: familiarity, an automatic and rapid process accompanied by a feeling of knowing, and recollection, a deliberate and time-consuming process with autonomous consciousness for studied episodes (Cui et al, 2016;Malejka & Bröder, 2016;Sun et al, 2018). It also posits that these two processes are differently engaged: familiarity is more crucial in item recognition, where it is sufficient to help participants discriminate studied items from unstudied ones.…”

Effects of congruent emotional contexts during encoding on recognition: An ERPs study

“…However, the emotional component isn't always inherent to the target item but might appear as cues related to it (i.e., context). For example, emotional stimuli can be introduced before, after, or alongside a critical neutral item (Cui et al., 2016; Pereira et al., 2021), i.e., serving as a context to the target item. In such cases, the presence of emotional stimuli may actually impair recognition memory for the critical item.…”

“…Prior studies on how emotional context affects memory when it is presented alongside the target stimuli have yielded inconsistent results (Minor & Herzmann, 2019). Many of these studies indicate that emotion either has no effect on recognition memory, with insignificant differences between items encoded in emotional and neutral contexts (Bowen & Kensinger, 2017, Bowen et al., 2018; Cui et al., 2016; Jaeger et al., 2009; Jeon et al., 2020; Maratos & Rugg, 2001, the results in Experiments 1; Pereira et al., 2021; Smith et al., 2004), or that it boosts recognition memory, with improved performance for items encoded in emotional contexts compared to neutral ones (Macri et al., 2018, 2020; Smith et al., 2005, 2006; Ventura‐Bort et al., 2017). Yet, some studies suggest that emotion can impair recognition performance (Jia, Gao, Wang, et al., 2020, the results in Experiments 2; Maratos & Rugg, 2001, the results in Experiments 2; Ventura‐Bort et al., 2016, 2020; Zhang et al., 2015; Zlomuzica et al., 2016).…”