Are emotionally charged lures immune to false memory?

Abstract

Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott task and E. Tulving's (1985) remember-know judgments for recognition memory, the authors explored whether emotional words can show the false memory effect. Participants studied lists containing nonemotional, orthographic associates (e.g., cape, tape, ripe; part, perk, dark) of either emotional (e.g., rape) or nonemotional (e.g., park) critical lures. This setup produced significant false "remembering" of emotional lures, even though initially no emotional words appeared at study. When 3 emotional nonlure words appeared at study, emotional-lure false recognition more than doubled. However, when these 3 study words also appeared on the recognition test, false memory for the emotional lures was reduced. Across experiments, participants misremembered nonemotional lures more often than they did emotional lures, but they were more likely to rate emotional lures as "remembered," once they had been recognized as "old." The authors discuss findings in light of J. J. Freyd and D. H. Gleave's (1996) criticisms of this task.

Illusory Memories of Emotionally Charged Words in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Further Evidence for Atypical Emotion Processing Outside the Social Domain

“…More specifically, whilst our findings from typical participants replicated the observations of Pesta et al (2001), that the experience of illusory memories is attenuated for emotionally charged as compared to neutral words, we observed no such attenuation for participants with ASD 1 . In the context of our recent observation that individuals with ASD do not retain emotionally significant words in a qualitatively distinct fashion over time (Gaigg & Bowler, 2008), we interpret the current findings as follows.…”

“…Half of these so-called Target Lures were neutral (e.g., Hook) and half of them were emotionally charged (e.g., 'Rape'). Pesta et al (2001) found that typical individuals were extremely unlikely to falsely identify the emotionally charged Target Lures as having been on the original study list whilst their false recognition rates of neutral Target Lures was far above chance. In other words, whilst the orthographic similarity between the studied words and the Target Lures gave rise to illusory memories of certain neutral words, the distinctive nature of the emotional words attenuated such illusory memories.…”

“…Over a lifetime, this would mean that individuals with ASD would accumulate representations of emotional information that are qualitatively indistinct from representations of non-emotional information. One way to test this contention is through a memory illusion paradigm developed by Pesta, Murphy and Sanders (2001). In their experiment, participants were presented with a list of words comprising blocks of orthographically associated words (e.g., Book, Nook, Cook, Look,…Cape, Tape, Shape, Nape,…) that participants were instructed to try to remember for a subsequent recognition memory test.…”

Valence and the development of immediate and long-term false memory illusions

“…Moreover, although some studies have found that emotion enhances correct recognition accuracy (e.g., Ochsner, 2000), a number of others found no advantage for emotional material (Comblain, D'Argembeau, Van der Linden, & Aldenhoff, 2004;Pesta et al, 2001;Windmann & Kutas, 2001), and still others have found lower recognition accuracy for negative than neutral words (Maratos, Allen, & Rugg, 2000). Our findings add to the growing consensus that when pure-list designs are used, negative-emotional material does not enjoy an advantage in true recall or recognition relative to neutral words.…”

“…In fact, false memory studies in which valence has been manipulated have revealed that participants are less likely to falsely recall and recognize negative-emotional critical lures as compared with neutral critical lures (e.g., Huang & Yeh, 2006;Kensinger & Corkin, 2004;Pesta, Murphy, & Sanders, 2001; but see Budson et al, 2006). Consistent with what we know about distinctiveness effects, the general explanation given for this finding concerns the distinctiveness of the emotional critical lures (e.g., Kensinger & Corkin, 2004).…”