The effects of emotion on working memory and executive control are often studied in isolation. Positive mood enhances verbal and impairs spatial working memory, whereas negative mood enhances spatial and impairs verbal working memory. Moreover, positive mood enhances executive control, whereas negative mood has little influence. We examined how emotion influences verbal and spatial working memory capacity, which requires executive control to coordinate between holding information in working memory and completing a secondary task. We predicted that positive mood would improve both verbal and spatial working memory capacity because of its influence on executive control. Positive, negative and neutral moods were induced followed by completing a verbal (Experiment 1) or spatial (Experiment 2) working memory operation span task to assess working memory capacity. Positive mood enhanced working memory capacity irrespective of the working memory domain, whereas negative mood had no influence on performance. Thus, positive mood was more successful holding information in working memory while processing task-irrelevant information, suggesting that the influence mood has on executive control supersedes the independent effects mood has on domain-specific working memory.

People frequently engage in conversation about shared autobiographical events from their lives, particularly those with emotional significance. The pervasiveness of this practice raises the question whether shared memory reconstruction has the power to influence the memory and emotions associated with such events. We developed a novel paradigm that combined the strengths of the methods from autobiographical and collaborative memory research traditions to examine such consequences. We selected a shared, real-life autobiographical event of an exam, and asked students to recall their memory of taking a recent exam where they provided a group and/or personal narrative of this autobiographical event. Students first recalled the event either collaboratively (C) or individually (I), followed by a final individual (I) recall by all. Valence ratings as well as the emotional tone of the narratives converged to show that prior collaborative remembering down-regulated negative emotion and enhanced the positive emotional tone of the memories. The recalled detail in the narratives indicated that at initial recall members of collaborative groups reported fewer internal details than those who recalled alone, and reported more external details in a later recall when working alone. Earlier collaboration also increased collective memory such that more of these details were shared among prior group members in their later individual recall compared with those who did not collaborate before. We discuss the influence of collaborative remembering on shaping memory and emotion for autobiographical events as well as the potential mechanisms that promote collective autobiographical memory. (PsycINFO Database Record

Sharing information and memories is a key feature of social interactions, making social contexts important for developing and transmitting accurate memories and also false memories. False memory transmission can have wide-ranging effects, including shaping personal memories of individuals as well as collective memories of a network of people. This paper reviews a collection of key findings and explanations in cognitive research on the transmission of false memories in small groups. It also reviews the emerging experimental work on larger networks and collective false memories. Given the reconstructive nature of memory, the abundance of misinformation in everyday life, and the variety of social structures in which people interact, an understanding of transmission of false memories has both scientific and societal implications.

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People routinely use news outlets and social media platforms to keep up with recent events. While information from these common sources often aligns in the messages conveyed, news headlines and microblogs on social media also frequently provide contradictory messages. In this study, we examined how people recall and recognize tweets and news headlines when these sources provide inconsistent messaging. We tested this question in person (Experiment 1) and online (Experiment 2). Participants studied news headlines and tweets that provided either consistent messaging or inconsistent messaging, then completed a free recall and recognition memory task sequentially, and provided confidence ratings for recognition judgments. Findings were similar across memory tasks and experiments: Participants had better memory for tweets than news headlines regardless of message consistency. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding memory in the digital age where social media use is widespread and messaging across sources is often inconsistent.

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