Emotion and False Memory

Abstract

Emotional memories are vivid and lasting but not necessarily accurate. Under some conditions, emotion even increases people's susceptibility to false memories. This review addresses when and why emotion leaves people vulnerable to misremembering events. Recent research suggests that pregoal emotions-those experienced before goal attainment or failure (e.g., hope, fear)-narrow the scope of people's attention to information that is central to their goals. This narrow focus can impair memory for peripheral details, leaving people vulnerable to misinformation concerning those details. In contrast, postgoal emotions-those experienced after goal attainment or failure (e.g., happiness, sadness)-broaden the scope of attention leaving people more resistant to misinformation. Implications for legal contexts, such as emotion-related errors in eyewitness testimony, are discussed.

Bias in predicted and remembered emotion

“…The pattern of greater accuracy for intensity than for feelings in general is also found for memory. A month after Obama's victories in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, participants remembered the intensity of their feelings about the election outcome far more accurately than they remembered their feelings in general [7]. These findings suggest that inaccuracy and overestimation are found most reliably for judgments that encompass the impact of events on the duration of emotion and overall mood.…”

“…Although episodic memory is constructive and error prone [7] being able to pull apart and update representations of past experiences allows people to piece them together in novel ways to simulate and prepare for the future. Semantic knowledge also scaffolds episodic representations of both past and future experiences [8].…”

“…Several factors likely contribute to people's relative strength in predicting and remembering emotional intensity [7,30]. When experiencing intense emotion, attention narrows to central or salient features of events at the expense of more peripheral features [13].…”

Jurors’ Emotions and Judgments of Legal Responsibility and Blame: What Does the Experimental Research Tell Us?

“…It speaks only to the effects of emotional states, not traits (e.g., Loewenstein & Lerner, 2003); it discusses central tendencies, not individual differences (e.g., ; and it concerns jurors', not judges', decision making (e.g., Maroney & Gross, 2014). Finally, it does not engage with the normative issue of whether jurors should use their emotions to help them determine legal responsibility and blame (e.g., Bandes, 1999 See also Kaplan, Van Damme, Levine, and Loftus (2016), reporting findings that anger focuses attention on goal-relevant information and narrows the range of information absorbed. 5…”

A Field Evolves: Introduction to the Special Section on Law and Emotion

“…It is against this backdrop that Robin L. Kaplan, Ilse Van Damme, Linda J. Levine, and Elizabeth F. Loftus offer "Emotion and False Memory," introducing to our mix the perspective of experimental psychology (Kaplan, Van Damme, Levine, & Loftus, 2016). Loftus long has been a prominent voice at the intersection of law and psychology; Levine is an expert in emotion and memory; and their coauthors round out an able team.…”