With Sadness Comes Accuracy; With Happiness, False Memory: Mood and the False Memory Effect

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm lures people to produce false memories. Two experiments examined whether induced positive or negative moods would influence this false memory effect. The affect-as-information hypothesis predicts that, on the one hand, positive affective cues experienced as task...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychological science 2005-10, Vol.16 (10), p.785-791
Main Authors: Storbeck, Justin, Clore, Gerald L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation - methods
Affect - physiology
Cognition
Control groups
Cues
Emotional states
Emotions
Empirical research
Experiment design
False memory
Happiness
Humans
Memory
Memory encoding
Mental Recall - physiology
Mood
Regression analysis
Repression, Psychology
Reproducibility of Results
Social psychology
Students - psychology
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Summary:The Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm lures people to produce false memories. Two experiments examined whether induced positive or negative moods would influence this false memory effect. The affect-as-information hypothesis predicts that, on the one hand, positive affective cues experienced as task-relevant feedback encourage relational processing during encoding, which should enhance false memory effects. On the other hand, negative affective cues are hypothesized to encourage item-specific processing at encoding, which should discourage such effects. The results of Experiment 1 are consistent with these predictions: Individuals in negative moods were significantly less likely to show false memory effects than those in positive moods or those whose mood was not manipulated. Experiment 2 introduced inclusion instructions to investigate whether moods had their effects at encoding or retrieval. The results replicated the false memory finding of Experiment 1 and provide evidence that moods influence the accessibility of lures at encoding, rather than influencing monitoring at retrieval of whether lures were actually presented.
ISSN:0956-7976
1467-9280
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01615.x