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

Abstract 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.