A Motivated False Memory: How Regulatory Focus Influence False Memory

Psychologists have long hypothesized that the human cognition is static and lessinfluenced by the groundings. Since the emergence of the―motivated cognition‖approach,there is an increasing number of researchers who focus on how the cognition is colored bymotivation. As the foundation of the cognition, memory is inevitably influenced by themotivation. Specially, the Regulatory Focus Theory is a newly developing motivationtheory, which disguished between two motivation orientation, the promotion focus and theprevention focus. Due to the difference of information processing style, these twomotivational orientations might lead to the different results in fasle memory. Thus, thisstudy aims to explore how the promotion focus and prevention focus may lead to differentresult in false memory, and shed light on this phenomenon.Research one adopted the modified DRM (Deese–Roediger–McDermott) paradigm.By using the scale to distinguish two motivation orientations, study one and study twotested the false recall and false recognition of promotion focus and prevention focus ones, respectively. The results showed that the promotion focus ones had a higher false recallrate and false recognition rate than prevention focus ones. Research two sought toreplicate the findings by conducting a modified DRM paradigm and explored the influenceof situational manipulated regulatory focus states on false memories. The results showedthat the promotion focus prime caused more critical lure hitting and veridical memory inboth recall and recognition task than the prevention focus prime. Research three aimed toexplore the mechanism on the difference effect of regulatory focus prime on the falsememory. Results showed that the relational and item specific processing style used bypromotion focus and prevention focus lead to this difference. This provide the directevidence that the motivation may exert influence on cognition by influence the processingstyle.Finally, the implications for how approach and avoidance motivation affected falsememory by processing style were discussed. Also, the author summarized the study in theperspective of motivated cognition, and pointed out the limitation and future direction ofthe research.