Weakening of recognition memory caused by task-irrelevant emotional encoding context can be modulated by individuals' inhibitory control

Previous studies have demonstrated weakened memory performance caused by emotional encoding contexts. However, whether and how an individual's inhibitory control ability modulates this emotional context effect remains unclear. The present study adopted a study-test paradigm with words as studied items and emotional pictures as backgrounds to address this question. The behavioral results showed that, for participants with low control ability (LCA) but not those with high control ability (HCA), the positive high-arousing context impaired word recognition performance compared to neutral and positive low-arousing contexts. Event-related potential (ERP) data at encoding indicated a significant emotional context effect after 150 ms post-stimulus and HCA participants demonstrated more negative ERPs than LCA participants in frontal sites during 300-500 ms. ERP results at retrieval revealed that the late positive component old/new effect in a positive high-arousing context appeared only in HCA participants. These results suggest that HCA participants can better suppress interference from emotional context at encoding and thus perform recall effectively at retrieval.