认知与发展心理学研究室知识库

前瞻记忆是指对未来要完成任务的记忆，前瞻记忆的受损会给个体和社会都造成严重的后果。提高前瞻记忆表现的关键之一是提高“线索”的显著性。前人研究表明情绪性线索对前瞻记忆有潜在促进作用，但结果并不一致，机制也尚未明晰。分析发现，这可能是与情绪线索的效价和唤醒度的不同作用机制有关，研究一和研究二在大学生群体中对这一假设进行了考察。研究一采用词语线索刺激，通过对效价和唤醒度的分别操控，结果发现情绪线索对前瞻记忆表现有显著提升作用。这一效应主要表现在情绪效价上，而唤醒度的主效应不显著，效价和唤醒度交互作用也不显著。此外，只有负性线索表现出了促进作用，而正性线索没有。

研究二采用更易诱发个体情绪唤醒度的图片刺激作为材料，结果与研究一相似，情绪效价的主效应显著，但除了负性线索，正性线索也表现出对前瞻记忆的促进作用。研究一和研究二的结果表明，情绪线索对前瞻记忆表现有促进作用，但主要是效价的作用，而唤醒度的作用并不显著。

研究三在前瞻记忆缺损严重的精神分裂症患者中进一步考察情绪线索的促进性作用。结果发现，尽管精神分裂症患者对情绪线索的情绪知觉正常，他们在含有情绪线索的前瞻记忆任务中仍表现出严重缺损，无法和健康对照组一样从情绪线索中获益。研究四在前瞻记忆缺损较轻的精神分裂症患者中再次考察了情绪促进性作用。结果和研究三一致，精神分裂症患者对情绪线索知觉正常，但仍然无法从情绪线索中获益。此外，这些精神分裂症患者在正性和负性线索的前瞻记忆任务中都表现出缺损，而中性线索的前瞻记忆并未受损，提示情绪线索前瞻记忆任务较之一般中性线索的前瞻记忆任务更为敏感，也更有利于探测精神分裂症患者前瞻记忆的缺损。

研究五考察了对情绪信息敏感的抑郁症患者。结果发现，负性线索显著促进了抑郁症患者的前瞻记忆表现;且无论线索是词语或图片，患者的前瞻记忆是否受损脑，患者的情绪状态是否低落，负性线索对抑郁症患者的前瞻记忆表现都有显著的促进作用，表明了这一效应的稳定性。和健康对照不同的是，正性线索对抑郁症患者的前瞻记忆并没有显著促进作用，提示抑郁症患者的负性偏好也存在于前瞻记忆中。

综上分析，本研究项目发现情绪线索对前瞻记忆有促进作用，且主要是通过情绪线索的效价而非唤醒度起作用。此外，较之正性线索，负性线索对前瞻记忆的促进作用更稳定，这可能与进化理论中负性偏向的生存优势有关。前瞻记忆存在缺损的精神分裂症患者无法从情绪线索中获益，且更容易在含有情绪线索的前瞻记忆任务中表现出缺损，表明患者情绪一记忆整合的缺损。抑郁症患者则表现出情绪线索促进效应的负性偏向。这些新颖的研究结果不仅揭示了情绪线索促进前瞻记忆的认知机制，也发现了临床群体在情绪一记忆整合方面的缺损和偏向性。未来的基础研究可进一步探索情绪线索促进前瞻记忆效应的脑神经机制，临床研究则可继续探讨临床群体中情绪提升效应缺失或存在偏向的深层原因。

Prospective memory (PM) is a memory for future tasks, and its impairment can lead to serious consequences to individuals and society. Improving cue salience is a crucial way to facilitate PM performance. Previous studies have indicated that that emotional cues have potential benefit for PM performance, but the results of these studies are inconsistent and the mechanism remains unclear. The inconsistency might be related, to the different mechanisms of valence and arousal of the emotional cues; and this hypothesis was tested in Study 1 and 2 by systematically varying the valence and arousal of emotional cues.

In Study 1，participants responded to emotional or neutral PM cues (viz., words) while completing a working memory task. Compared to neutral cues, negative cues enhanced PM accuracy while positive cues did not. Arousal did not significantly affect PM performance. Study 2 had the same design as Study 1 except that pictures instead of words were used as stimuli. Both negative and positive emotional cues enhanced PM accuracy, while arousal had no significant effect on PM.

Study 3 examined the enhancement effect of emotional cues in patients with schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia failed to show any PM enhancement effect despite having normal emotional ratings to the emotional cues. This finding was replicated in Study 4 in which, a group of schizophrenia patients with less PM impairment also failed to show any emotional enhancement effect despite normal emotional preception to the emotional cues. In addition, these patients were impaired in PM tasks with emotional cues but not the PM tasks with neutral cues, suggesting increased sensitivity of emotionally cued PM tasks in detecting early PM deficits. These findings suggested deficiency of emotion-memory integration in schizophrenia patients, and extend their PIVI deficits to PM tasks with emotional cues.

Study 5 tested patients with major depressive disorder and found that these patients showed significant improvement in PM performance when cued by negative emotional cues, thus extending the negative bias to PM in depressive patients. In addition, the enhancement effect by negative cues occurred irrespective of stimulus type, PM impairment or mood status, showing the relatively stableness of this effect. Unlike healthy controls, positive cues failed to enhance PM performances in depressed patients. These findings show for the first time that negative bias also occur in PM in depressed patients.

Taken together, these results suggest that emotional cues enhance PM performance, which appears to be driven mainly by valence rather than arousal aspect of the emotional cues. In addition, the effect was more consistent for negative than positive emotional cues, which may be associated with evolutionary benefit of negative bias. Patients with schizohprenia failed to show the emotional enhancement for impaired PM, and were more impaired in emotionally cued PIVI tasks, suggesting deficit in emotion-memory integration. In contrast, patients with major depressive disorders showed negative bias of the emotional enhancement effect. These noval findings not only show the mechanism of emotional cues in facilitating PM, but also imply paitents' impairment in integrating emotion and memory. Future study should continue exploring the neural mechanism of the emotional cues and clinical research can investigate the causes for the absence or bias of the emotional enhancement effect in clinical populations.