Author(s)

Yu Lan

Corresponding Author

Yu Lan

ABSTRACT

Emotional events were generally considered to be better remembered than neutral events. Researches find that emotional content influences working memory capacity in either enhancement or impairment way. We employed an operation span (OSPAN) task with either words or emotional faces to investigate the effects of emotional content on working memory capacity. In a relatively small group of observers, emotional words showed no significant impairment on working memory capacity. When the emotional words and the neutral words were mixed to display, working memory capacity were significantly reduced while the accuracy of recalling in correct order were boosted. We further explored working memory capacity of the emotional faces using an OSPAN task. Although the facial emotion of each image was not required to be remembered, working memory capacity was reduced when encoding the emotional faces and recalling neutral faces compared with the condition that neutral faces for both encoding and recalling. This strong impairment effect might be caused by greater valence of emotional face images than emotional words. This impairment cannot be attributed to the failure of same identity recognition with different emotions. In an identity recognition task, different emotions of same identity showed a greater performance than the different identity recognition.

KEYWORDS

Sentiments, Memory ability, working memory capacity