The influence of social anxiety-provoking contexts on context reinstatement effects

Abstract

The context reinstatement (CR) effect is the finding that target stimuli are better remembered when presented in the same context as during initial encoding, compared with a different context. It remains unclear, however, whether emotional features of the context affect this memory benefit. In two experiments, we investigated whether the anxiety-provoking nature of a context scene might influence the CR effect. During encoding, participants viewed target faces paired with scenes validated as either highly anxiety-provoking or not, half of which contained other faces embedded within the scene. During retrieval, target faces were presented again with either the same or a new context scene. In Experiment 1, the expected CR effect was observed when the contexts were low-anxiety scenes or high-anxiety scenes without embedded faces. In contrast, the CR effect was absent when the contexts were high-anxiety scenes containing embedded faces. In Experiment 2, to determine whether the presence of embedded faces or the anxiety level of scenes reduced the CR effect, we included an additional context type: low-anxiety scenes with embedded faces. Once again, the CR effect was absent only when the context scene was highly anxiety-provoking with embedded faces: reinstating this context type failed to benefit memory for targets. Results suggest that the benefit to target memory via reinstating a context depends critically on emotional characteristics of the reinstated context.

Keywords: Memory; context reinstatement; emotion; social anxiety.

Figure 1.

Sample scene images, varied by Scene Anxiety Type (low anxiety-provoking, high anxiety-provoking) and Scene Face Presence (without embedded faces, with embedded faces). To avoid copyright issues, images in this figure are similar to, but not the exact stimuli presented in our experiments.

Figure 2.

Summary of the experimental procedure. To avoid copyright issues, scene images in this figure are similar to, but not the exact stimuli presented in our experiments.

Figure 3.

Mean accuracy rate for Face Recognition in Experiment 1 as a function of Context and Scene Type. Error bars represent ±1 standard error of the mean and asterisks represent significance of p < .05.

Figure 4.

Mean accuracy rate for Face Recognition in Experiment 2 as a function of Context, Scene Anxiety Type, and Scene Face Presence. Error bars represent ±1 standard error of the mean and asterisks represent significance of p < .05.