The Effect Of Mood On Spontaneous False Memory And Its Underlying Mechanism

False memory refers to situations in which people remember events that never happened or remember them quite differently from what they experience in fact.There are two main types of false memory:spontaneous false memory and implanted false memory.Spontaneous false memory is attributable to endogenous wrong associations.Implanted false memory is attributable to external distortion.In recent decades,some researchers have explored the causes of false memories through lots of experiments and found that false memory is closely related to emotion.The present study investigated the effects of both valence and arousal of participants’ mood on spontaneous false memory and its underlying mechanism by using DRM paradigm.The present study consisted of three parts,eight experiments in total.The first part consisted of one experiment,examined the effectiveness of three mood induction pro-cedures(MIP)for inducing four specific mood varying along the dimensions of both valence and arousal to choose effective MIP for the present study.In experiment 1,participants were randomly assigned to a music and picture MIP,or a music and auto-biographical recall MIP or a flim and underwent a positive mood with high arousal,positive mood with low arousal,negative mood with high arousal and negative mood with low arousal induction.The second part consisted of two experiments,exploring whether valence or arousal is most critical in determining spontaneous false memory.Both exprimet 2 and 3,used a music and autobiographical recall MIP to induce positive mood with high arousal,positive mood with low arousal,negative mood with high arousal,negative mood with low arousal and neutral mood.A delayed recognition test was used in experiment 2 to investigate the effect of valence and arousal on spontaneous false recognition.A delayed free recall tests was used in experiment 3 to investigate the effect of valence and arousal on false recall.The third part consisted of five experiments,aming to reveal the underlying mechanism of affect effect on spontaneous false memory.Experiment 4 and 5 manipulated the timing of the mood induction to determine inde-pendent effects of affect on both encoding and retrieval.In experiment 4,a music and autobiographical recall MIP was used to induce four specific mood varying along the dimensions of both valence and arousal before learning DRM word lists,and to elicit neutral mood prior to retrieval.In experiment 5,four specific mood varying along the dimensions of both valence and arousal were elicited prior to retrieval,neutral affect state was elicited before learning DRM word lists.Experiment 6 used inclusion instruc-tion to assess whether affect influenced activation process or monitoring process.Ex-periment 7 and experiment 8 investigated the effect of mood on activation through ma-nipulating mixed presentation of lists and processing style respectively.Based on the above experiments,the main findings of the present study are as follows:(1)A music and autobiographical recall MIP and a music and picture MIP can effectively induce four specific mood varying along the dimensions of both valence and arousal.(2)High-arousal mood increases the probability of spontaneous false memory in contrast to low-arousal mood,regardness of valence.(3)Arousal has its effect at encoding,but not retrieval processes of spontaneous false memory.(4)High-arousal mood enhances the probability of spontaneous false memory re-gardness of the contribution of monitoring processes.(5)High-arousal mood enhances the probability of spontaneous false memory in contrast to low-arousal mood when the gist of list was high-priotity information,whereas low-arousal mood increases the probability of spontaneous false memory in contrast to high-arousal mood when the specific list word was high-priotity information.The above fingdings suggest that arousal is most critical in determining spontane-ous false memory,it may influence spontaneous false memory through affecting the activation processes at encoding.The findings of the present study support fuzzy-trace theory and arousal-biased competition theory.