To examine the effects of exposure to complex autobiographical events on imagination inflation, subjects performed a 3-stage procedure. First, they rated their confidence that a list of events had happened in their childhood. Second, subjects imagined and paraphrased complex fictitious events 0, 1, 3, or 5 times. Finally, they rated their confidence for the childhood events a second time. We found that subjects became more confident that the fictitious events really did happen in childhood, regardless of whether they were imagined or paraphrased. There was no repetition effect beyond that of a single exposure. Taken together with the results of other research, our data suggest that the greater processing fluency associated with the target events drives imagination inflation.
<p>Negative emotion is often associated with emotion-congruent biases in information processing. However, rather than all negative emotion being associated with biases in all information processes, certain components of emotion appear to be associated with specific biases. This project examined two examples of specific associations. First, Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews (1988, 1997) have argued that anxiety is associated with biases on tasks involving priming, and depression is associated with biases on tasks involving elaboration. Second, most models of mood-congruent bias have given purely cognitive explanations; these models suggest that biases should be more closely associated with the cognitive symptoms than the somatic symptoms of depression (Horowitz, Nelson, & Person, 1997). Evidence is reviewed that suggests this may not be the case. These issues were examined in two experiments, each of which administered a broad range of tasks to a large sample of students. The experiments examined attention and judgement, and explicit, implicit, and autobiographical memory. It was hypothesised that Williams et al.'s (1988, 1997) predictions about the task-specific effects of anxiety and depression would be confirmed, and that the somatic symptoms of depression would have a greater influence on information processing biases than the cognitive symptoms. Emotion-congruent biases were not shown on every task, but on the tasks where biases were shown, the hypotheses were broadly confirmed. Strengths, limitations, and implications of the studies are discussed. Current cognitive and neuropsychological models of emotion are used to provide a possible explanation of the results.</p>
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