The Influence Of Emotional States On False Memory

In the introduction part, the theories and experimental researches into false memory were first reviewed. And some recent laboratorial research were introduced. Then, in the conclusion section, the research illustrated the purpose of this research. In the experimental part, two experiments were carried out to examine the effects of emotional states and warning introduction on false recognition in the DRM paradigm. In experiment 1, we had obtained the different emotional state induced by music. And the variable of emotional state was manipulated. The result suggests that negative emotional group were significantly less likely to show false memory effects than positive emotional group. Positive emotional group has lower d' than negative emotional group on study items, and non-presented lures. In experiment 2, warning introduction was manipulated to investigate the process of monitoring in encoding. The result suggest that once facilitated in encoding, the effect of strategy process of monitoring on reducing false memory could be most effective for negative emotional group, but not for positive emotional group. In no warning condition, there was significant difference on D2 between two emotional groups;in warning condition, there was significant difference on both Dl and D2, this result confirm that monitoring process has influence on false memory effect.In all, different emotional states have different affects on false memory. Negative emotional states encourage item-specific processing, and then critical lures should less likely to come to mind. On the other hand, positive emotional states encourage relational processing, and then such lures should be more likely to come to mind. Meanwhile, the result also indicates that warning induction have different effects on different emotional group, which influenced by factors such as the quality and type of encoding information.