Differences in the effect of emotional context of different Emotion-Inducing methods on target memory performance.

Memory for a target is significantly influenced by the emotional context in which it is embedded, and different emotion-inducing methods do not yield identical effects on memory. As a result, the impact of emotional context on target memory may vary depending on the specific emotion-inducing methods. This study explored the emotional memory congruence effect when emotional events and emotional pictures were used as the emotional context across five experiments. The findings demonstrated that negative emotional event, when used as a context, had an inhibitory effect on target memory performance, whereas positive emotional event facilitated memory performance. Additionally, no emotional congruence effect was observed when emotional events were employed as the context. Based on these results, it can be concluded that there is a significant difference between the effects of emotional events and emotional pictures as context on target memory. Moreover, the emotional congruence effect may not apply to all types of emotion-inducing methods.