Abstract
Although a lot of recent research focuses on the relationship between emotion and prospective memory (PM), fewer studies yet have explored the relationship between emotion and aftereffects of PM. The aftereffects of PM are the phenomenon that an individual repeatedly performs an already completed-PM intention (commission errors), or the completed intention interferes with the ongoing task performance. This study adopted the repeated PM target paradigm and explored the effect of emotional target and context on the aftereffects of PM through two Experiments. Experiment 1 aimed at distinguishing the effect of target valence and arousal on aftereffects of PM. Considering that the effect of PM target might be affected by the valence of ongoing task stimuli (context valence), Experiment 2 was conducted to further explore the effect of target valence, arousal, and context valence on aftereffects of PM based on Experiment 1. The results of the two studies suggest that: (1) the positive, negative, and high arousal PM targets are likely to increase the risk of the aftereffects of PM, (2) the PM target and context from the same valence are likely to yield greater aftereffects of PM, and that (3) context valence is likely to modulate the effect of arousal on aftereffects of PM in different target valence.
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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China under Grant BBA180082 and the New Century Excellent Talents Support Program of Education Department of Fujian Province under Grant 20180495.
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Xin, C., Chen, Y., Zhang, M. et al. The effect of emotional target and context on the aftereffects of prospective memory. Curr Psychol 42, 28007–28025 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03907-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03907-0