Abstract
Prospective memory refers to a psychological process to remember a planned action or intention at some future point in time, and is modulated by emotion. However, little is known about individual differences in an interaction between emotion and prospective memory. The current study investigated this issue. Participants were presented with 960 pictures in each of ongoing and prospective memory tasks. In the ongoing task, participants made categorical judgment for each picture. In the prospective memory task, participants responded to emotionally negative and neutral target pictures, which were presented by around 44 seconds. Results demonstrated that response times for negative targets in the prospective memory task were significantly slower than those for neutral targets, and the delayed responses were significantly correlated with individual differences of moods. These findings suggest that prospective memories could be inhibited by negative emotion, and that the inhibition could be predicted by individual differences of negative mood.
