Effects of congruent emotional contexts during encoding on recognition: An ERPs study

Past research showed that emotional contexts can impair recognition memory for the target item. Given that item-context congruity may enhance recognition memory, the present study aims to examine the effect of the congruent emotional encoding contexts on recognition memory. Participants studied congruent word-picture pairs (e.g., the word "cow" - a picture describing a cow) and incongruent word-picture pairs (e.g., the word "cow" - a picture describing a goat) and, subsequently, were asked to report the nature of the picture (emotional or neutral). Behavioral results revealed that emotional contexts impaired source but not item recognition, with congruent word-context mitigating this impairment and enhancing item recognition. Neural results from ERPs and theta oscillations found the recollection process, as shown by the LPC old/new effect and theta oscillations, for both item and source recognition across emotional contexts, irrespective of congruity. Meanwhile, the familiarity process as indexed by the FN400 old/new effect was found only for item recognition in congruent emotional contexts. These findings suggest that the congruent relationship of item-context could mitigate the emotion-induced source memory impairment and enhance item memory, with neural results elucidating the memory processes involved in retrieval of emotional information. Specifically, while emotion-related information generally elicits the recollection-based memory process, only congruent emotional information elicits the familiarity-based process.