Abstract: Previous studies had found that acute psychosocial stress would impair the retrieval of the autobiographical memory. However, they rarely investigated the effect of acute psychosocial stress on the self-referential memory. So the current study was aimed to broaden this field.Fifty-nine participants were random divided into high stress group and low stress group by mean split of their heart rates responses during the stage of TSST (Trier Social Stress Test), which resulted a final dataset of thirty-two participants in the high stress group and twenty-seven participants in the low stress group. All participants finished the self-referential memory task in which participants were asked to judge whether some adjectives were appropriate to describe the self, mother and a celebrity (e.g., Lu Xun) and then were asked to recognize whether some adjectives were old or new. If participants judged an item to be an old item, they would further asked to make an R/K judgment by indicating whether ‘remembering’ (consciously recollect specific details of the item at the time it was presented, ‘R score’) or simply ‘knowing’ (feel familiar, but participants were unable to recollect details of its prior list, ‘K score’). Results showed that the recognition accuracy of R-response for self-relevance condition was higher in low stress group than that in high stress group. Further, participants' heart rates during the stage of TSST were negatively correlated with their recognition accuracy of R-response for self-relevance condition. Our findings indicate that stress-induced decreased the recognition of the self-relevance traits.

Key words: acute psychological stress, self-reference memory, TSST, R/K judgment