Anxiety-provoking context scenes can reduce the context reinstatement effect
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Reinstating the same context from encoding during retrieval has been shown to benefit memory. In two experiments, we investigated whether anxiety-provoking context scenes lessened the context reinstatement (CR) benefit. We found that reinstating anxiety-provoking contexts failed to benefit target memory. Results suggest that the benefit of reinstating a context, on target memory, depends critically on the characteristics of the reinstated context.