Abstract: Vividness, often defined as the amount of perceptual or sensory detail, has been the autobiographical memory property studied most in emotional memories. A growing body of evidences suggests that a primary way by which emotion modulates memory is by intensifying the recollective experience—that is, the subjective vividness of the memory. Emotion boosts memory accuracy to an extent, but it affects the subjective sense of recollection even more. Vividness of emotional memory can help guide our actions. If we are unsure about a memory, we may take additional time to search our memory or look for additional cues before acting. However, if we are highly confident in our memory, our subsequent actions are more likely to be quick and decisive. The present research asks how emotion enhances the subjective sense of recollection？ One method for testing the belief that emotion enhances the recollection of details is to collect subjective reports of “remembering” during recognition. In the remember-know paradigm, participants study some materials and are then given a recognition test during which they distinguish “old” responses that involve recollection (i.e., “remembered” stimuli) from those that do not (stimuli they “know” were studied). Recent studies indicate that the proportion of “remembered” judgments to emotionally arousing stimuli is elevated in comparison with neutral stimuli, which suggests arousal enhancing the vividness of emotional memory. Other researchers challenged this conclusion with receiver operating characteristic curve data, and they found emotion increases subjective reports of “remembering”, which is due to response bias differences. We suggest the remembering is enhanced by valence depending on high arousal. To confirm the hypothesis, an experiment was conducted. Before the experiment, 32 undergraduates who did not participate in the following experiment rated the familiarity, complexity, arousal and valence of pictures (pictures from CAPS) on nine–scale, and their EMG, HR and SCR data were recorded by ProComp. In the present experiment 63 undergraduate participants were instructed to study 90 pictures .They were 30 neutral nonarousing pictures(M valence= 5.14, M arousal=2.62; M familiarity=5.37, M complexity=5.54), 30 negative arousing pictures(M valence= 3.10, M arousal=6.10; M familiarity=5.34, M complexity=5.75), and 30 positive arousing pictures(M valence= 6.30, M arousal=6.23; M familiarity=5.31, M complexity=5.61). The main effects of emotion on EMG and HR data, and SCR data of positive and negative pictures were worse than neutral nonarousing pictures. There was a fixation for 0.5 seconds on screen, and then pictures were shown one at a time for 2 seconds each in the middle of the computer screen. Immediately, one week, two weeks, or three weeks delay following the presentation of the study list, participants made recognition judgments for 180 test pictures (half studied and half new). For each picture participants called “old,” they were asked to make a remember–know judgment. Study and test sequences were randomly ordered for each participant. Remember response rates were submitted to an analysis of repeated measuring variance with emotionality of the pictures (negative and arousing, neutral, positive and arousing) and study-test delay time (Immediately, one week, two weeks, and three weeks). The main effects of study-test delay time were significant, F (3, 59) =3.55, p<.05. Participants claimed to remember more details of having studied negative and positive stimuli than neutral stimuli. The main effects of emotion were significant, F (2,118) =3.99, p<.05, which showed the enhanced remembering was much more by the emotional stimulus than neutral one. The interaction of emotionality of the pictures and study-test delay time was significant, F (6,118) =5.46, p<.01. On different study-test delay time, Remember response rate of positive arousing pictures declined from slowly to quickly, and then slowly. Remember response rate of negative arousing pictures declined from quickly to slowly. Remember response rate of neutral nonarousing pictures declined quickly. Above all, emotional memory is more vivid, and vividness of emotional memory is enhanced by valence depending on high arousal.

Key words: emotional memory, vividness, valence

摘要： 大量研究表明，情绪在一定程度上提高了记忆的准确性，但是情绪对记忆鲜活性的影响更大，该文关注延时条件下情绪记忆鲜活性的研究。研究采用记得/知道范式，操控图片情绪性和测验延时变量，结果发现情绪记忆的记得成绩好于中性记忆，且在不同延时测验下，正性高唤醒图片的记得成绩下降由慢到快再到慢的变化，负性高唤醒图片的记得下降由快到慢变化，而中性则快速下降。说明情绪记忆更具鲜活性，且是效价在高唤醒下起的作用。

关键词: 情绪记忆, 鲜活性, 效价