Emotional Focus and Source Monitoring

Source monitoring is not always enhanced for valenced material

“…Presumably, the cognitive effort in generating an answer to the question reduced binding of which person asked the question. Moreover, Johnson, Nolde, and De Leonardis (1996) found a similar effect with emotional statements. In a regression analysis that was subsidiary to their primary aims, they reported that item memory for more highly rated emotional items was better than for neutral statements, but that source memory was worse for the emotional statements.…”

Reality monitoring of physically similar and conceptually related objects

“…Whether one attends to particular features of an item is more a function of one's goals than of the item or its source. In fact, other work has shown that orienting tasks that increase item memory do not necessarily increase source monitoring accuracy (Johnson, Nolde, & DeLeonardis, 1996;Lindsay & Johnson, 1989), which suggests that focusing attention on particular features of an event does not necessarily provide reliable cues as to the source of the event.…”

Social influences on reality-monitoring decisions

“…For example, associated memories of false starts at self-generating an antonym might come to mind during the test and serve as cues that the memory was originally imagined. In contrast to memories for imagined events, memories for real events are likely to be rich in cues to their external perceptual origin: colors, perceptual clarity and vividness (sensory properties), contextual information, such as relative spatial location and temporal order (Johnson & Raye, 1981;Johnson, Raye, Foley, & Kim, 1982; see also Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988), and affect (Johnson et al, 1988;Johnson, Nolde, & De Leonardis, 1996;Johnson & Suengas, 1989). The present study explores a factor besides qualitative characteristics that might be involved in reality-monitoringdecisions: social influence.…”