关键词: 定向遗忘, 关联性, 情绪记忆, 要义/细节权衡

Abstract: Emotional memory has been studied widely in recent years. Researchers not only focused on how to increase our memory, but also on how to forget the unwanted memory. Some investigators often used the directed forgetting paradigm to explore the forgetting of negative emotional memory, the directed forgetting refers that memory performance would be impaired under the forgetting instruction. In the typical directed forgetting paradigm, participants are presented with words, and are instructed either to remember or to forget these words or pictures, subsequently participants are asked to recall or recognize both to-be-forgotten words (F words) and to-be-remembered words (R words). The basic directed forgetting effect consists of a decrease in memory performance for to-be-forgotten words, combined with a recall advantage for to-be-remembered words. 　　Previous studies have found that the directed forgetting effect of emotional materials is different from that of neutral ones. In most cases, neutral materials showed significant directed forgetting effect, namely memory performance of to-be-forgotten words is lower than that of to-be-remembered words, but the results from directed forgetting of emotional materials were mixed. Furthermore, most previous researches on directed forgetting of emotional memory used simple emotional materials (such as words, pictures), complex emotional events are scarcely investigated. Therefore, we tried to use negative emotional videos that contain more emotional information as experimental materials, which are more similar to our real life events. Meanwhile, the materials used in previous directed forgetting studies are often irrelevant of each other. As is well know, if there existed relevance between the materials, participants were more likely to process them as a whole, which would prevent directed forgetting. Therefore, we use the list method directed forgetting paradigm to investigate the impact of content-relevance and self-relevance of events on directed forgetting. 　　In the present study, we conducted 2×2 mixed designs in 2 experiments. In experiment1, we examined the effect of content relevance between the negative emotional events on directed forgetting, moreover, we analysized the overall memory, gist memory and detail memory of negative emotional videos separately. The results of experiment1 showed that the content-relevance of events did not affect the directed forgetting, but when content was highly related between events, memory of gist and detail of to-be-remembered negative emotional events enhanced. In experiment 2, we examined the effect of self-relevant on directed forgetting of negative emotional memory, which found self-relevance affected the directed forgetting of negative emotion, namely directed forgetting appeared under the self-relevance condition; but directed forgetting disappeared under the self-irrelevance condition. Especially in experiment2, we found self-relevance took different roles in gist memory and detail memory, self-relevance enhanced detail memory, but decreased gist memory. 　　In conclusion, the results revealed that content-relevance eliminated the directed forgetting effect. However, self-relevance of events showed significant directed forgetting effect, self-irrelevance of events did not. Memory performance for gist and detail showed significant trade-off effect.

Key words: directed forgetting, relevance, emotional memory, gist/detail trade-off