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ISSN : 1226-9654

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Vol.29 No.4

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The Effect of the Valence and Arousal of a Word on the Memory after Incidental Learning

The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology / The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology, (P)1226-9654; (E)2733-466X
2017, v.29 no.4, pp.351-369
https://doi.org/10.22172/cogbio.2017.29.4.002


& (2017). The Effect of the Valence and Arousal of a Word on the Memory after Incidental Learning. The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology, 29(4), 351-369, https://doi.org/10.22172/cogbio.2017.29.4.002

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of emotional characteristics of the word on recognition memory. To do so, the effects of valence level and arousal level of words on recognition after incidental learning were investigated. In Experiment 1, participants performed a lexical decision task with negative and neutral words. Later, participants were asked to recognize whether each test word was shown when they performed the lexical decision task. After completing the recognition task, participants also judged what color the words were(associative memory task). The results showed that words with negative valence were recognized better than those with neutral valence. Also, regardless of the memory tasks, words with higher arousal level were recognized worse than those with lower arousal level. In Experiment 2, participants performed a same task with positive and neutral words. The results show that positive words were recognized better than neutral words. However, there was no difference based on the dimensions of emotion in the performance of the associative memory task. The results of the two experiments showed the differential effects of the valence and arousal on cognitive processes. The results indicate that the reason that emotion helps memory is the effect of valence of two dimensions of emotion. The results also showed that, for negative information, the memory processing is interrupted when the arousal level is too high. Arousal level of the positive information is irrelevant to the memory. The results further suggest that the inconsistent findings across previous studies might be due to not dissociating the valence and arousal level of the affective stimulus.

keywords
emotional word, valence, arousal, incidental learning, memory, 정서단어, 정서가, 각성가, 우연학습, 기억

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