Reward, Negative Emotion, and Prospective Memory

Experiment 1 (N=173) showed that rewards improved PM accuracy equally in neutral and negative emotional states, with the strongest effect when rewards targeted the PM task specifically. Experiment 2 (N=166) found that when only some PM tasks were rewarded, the benefit observed in neutral states was fully eliminated under negative emotions, regardless of cue semantic similarity.

Thus, negative emotion does not abolish the general reward effect, but it does disrupt reward-based discrimination—highlighting key boundary conditions for motivational interventions.