Abstract: The effect of emotion on memory has increasingly received attention from cognitive psychologists over the past several decades. This article is a summary of the research that I conducted for my dissertation under the supervision of Professor Xiaolan Fu in the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. My research was concerned with the effect of emotion on item memory and source memory for Chinese words. When emotion was elicited by emotional words during encoding, the main findings were: 1) Negative emotion enhanced free recall, whereas there was only a trend that positive emotion enhanced free recall. 2) Negative emotion reduced general recognition, whereas positive emotion had no effect on general recognition. Additionally, neither positive nor negative emotion affected recollection. However, negative emotion reduced familiarity, and positive emotion had no effect on familiarity. 3) Neither positive nor negative emotion affected source memory (i.e., memory for font colors of words). When emotion was elicited by emotional video clips after encoding, the main findings were: 1) For females, negative emotion enhanced consolidation of item memory. However, for males, neither negative emotion nor positive emotion had an effect on item memory. 2) Neither negative nor positive emotion had an effect on source memory. The above findings have theoretical significance for the establishment of the relationship between emotion and memory consolidation, and have practical implications for improving students’ memory consolidation in educational settings.

Key words: emotion, item memory, source memory, encoding, memory consolidation