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The Effects of Emotion on False Memory Production

Author
Patel, Jay
Abstract
This study seeks to investigate the effects of emotion on false memory production. 114
undergraduate college students participated in the study. Subjects were given an emotion
induction task that induced positive, negative, or neutral moods by rating person descriptive
words taken from the Dumas norms. Each subject was then asked to listen to lists of study
words taken from the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm and was then given an immediate
recognition memory test. One week later, subjects were given a delayed recognition memory test to measure the degree of forgetting. Results indicate that on the immediate test, although
there were no differences observed across emotion conditions for true memory, participants in
the negative emotion condition were more prone to produce false memories than those in the
positive or neutral conditions. In addition, there was no main effect of emotion for the
immediate test, but there was one for the delayed memory test. It was found that acceptance
rates of both targets and critical distractors decreased for participants in the negative emotion
condition relative to positive and neutral conditions. It was also found that one could inoculate the effects of forgetting on a delayed memory test by giving subjects a prior memory test.
Date Issued
2007-05-15Subject
False Memories; Emotion Memory