The Emotional Impact On The Relevance Of False Memory: An ERP Study

The impact of emotion on memory is an important topic in the study of cognitive psychology. For this issue, Researchers at home and abroad mainly focused on the in-depth study of correct memory in the past, domestic and foreign scholars began to shift from the correct memory to false memory, and gradually explore the impact of emotion on false memory, especially the associatively false memory in recent years. There are a few behavioral experiments about the issue at home and abroad, found the positive emotions produce more false memories than the negative emotions. Most researchers use the affect-as-information hypothesis to explain this phenomenon, emotions impact on the encoding mode of information, the positive emotions promote relational processing, and the negative emotions promote item-specific processing. Studies abroad using behavioral experiment have proved that emotions thereby affect the associatively false memory, but there is still a lack of verification of this theory at home and abroad.This study used the event-related potentials (ERP) to examine the mechanisms of the induced emotions affecting the associatively false memory-the affect-as-information hypothesis. This experiment used the DRM paradigm, learning some vocabularies with the color characteristics then recognizing, and analyzed the sensitivity for colors, the sensitivity for related lures and the related EEG data.Experiment1, the type of emotions was the between-subjects variable, the vocabularies were presented for2000ms in the learning stage and the test mode was a secondary judgment, firstly the old or new judging and then the color judging. Experiment2, the type of emotions was the within-subject variable, the vocabularies were presented for1000ms in the learning stage and the test mode was a first judgment, directly determining whether the test vocabularies were the learned vocabularies. The two experiments were not found significant differences in the behavioral results. The EEG results in Experiment1showed that, the vocabularies which were inducing false memories induced a greater LPP (late positive potential) than the vocabularies which were not inducing false memories in the different types of emotions; the positive emotions induced a greater LPP than the negative emotions in the different types of memories. The EEG results in Experiment2showed that, the vocabularies which were inducing false memories false memory induced a greater LPP than the vocabularies which were not inducing false memories in the different types of emotions, in addition, the vocabularies which were inducing false memories false memory induced a greater P2in the positive emotions; the positive emotions induced a greater LPP than negative emotions in inducing false memories and not inducing false memories, but the negative emotions induced a greater LPP than the positive emotions in the color judgment correctly.This study verified the mechanism of emotions influencing the associatively false memory-the affect-as-information hypothesis, that is, the positive emotions promote relational processing, and the negative emotions promote item-specific processing.