Abstract: The cognitive ability to encode, store, and execute intended action is termed as prospective memory. As a high-level psychological function, prospective memory is influenced by attention control and emotional state. This study aims to elucidate the potential influences of induced negative emotion on the ability to carry out intended actions. We also plan to verify whether the prospective memory performance of the participants who have shared their negative emotion with their friends will be better than those who have ruminated on their negative emotion or distracted their attention from it. If so, we can validate our definition of interpersonal and intrapersonal emotion regulation and further explore their underlying mechanism.
The double-task prospective memory test was conducted to probe into the above hypothesis. The test was programmed in VC++ and showed to participants on a computer screen. One hundred and sixty-nine students were randomly chosen from same year and department at one university and divided into five groups, including control group, no-regulating group, rumination-regulating group, distraction-regulating group and emotion-sharing group. The subjects’ emotional state was recorded before and after the experiment of watching aversive video clip. Four participants’ data were excluded due to poor performance at ongoing task and nineteen participants’ data were excluded due to failure of inducing negative emotion. Therefore, a total of one hundred and forty-six participants’ data were analyzed.
The results showed that the performance of ongoing task and prospective memory were impaired by inducing negative emotion. The emotion-sharing groups’ performance of prospective memory was significantly better than that of rumination-regulating group, especially in the situation of high cognitive load.
Based on current findings, we suggest researchers pay more attention to interpersonal interaction of emotional experience and evaluate emotional health problems in the interpersonal context. Moreover, researchers may explore the emotional meaning from the view of shared emotion and understand the mechanism of emotion regulation from a new, information-processing perspective

Key words: emotion, interpersonal emotion regulation, intrapersonal emotion regulation, prospective memory