Effects Of Material Emotion And Reference Conditions On Error Memory

People can remember items that have studied or things that have happened, forming veridical memory. On the other hand, people may mistakenly recognize or recall what has never seen, or the memory for details or source does not conform to the real situation, producing false memories. Lots of research have demonstrated that both veridical and false memory may be influenced by emotionality of memory materials and reference conditions. The ratio of veridical and false memory of emotional materials should be higher than those of neutral materials, namely emotional enhancement effect. The ratio of veridical and false memory of materials that under the condition of self-referencing should be higher than those under other referencing conditions, namely self-reference effect. Furthermore, there may be interaction effect in the influence of emotionality of memory materials and reference conditions on veridical memory. For example, people may have a better memory performance on the positive information than negative information related to self. But now there were little research simultaneously investigated the effect of emotionality of memory materials and reference conditions on false memory. Meanwhile, there must be an associative memory between the memory materials and reference object, since we generally present the memory materials and reference object at the same time in different referencing operations. And according to some studies, the associative memory can also be affected by the emotionality of memory materials and reference conditions. However, former research on the effect of emotionality of memory materials and reference conditions on memory mainly focus on item memory rather than associative memory, used item recognition task but not association recognition task. In addition, there should be a self-serving bias in association recognition, that is judging more positive information as relating to self and judging more negative information as relating to others. Former research only investigates one aspect of the above two, lacking direct investigation on the self-serving bias in memory. Then, whether emotional enhancement effect and self-reference effect will appear if we simultaneously investigate emotionality of memory materials and reference conditions on false memory and adopt item recognition task? Whether such two effects will appear if we change the recognition task to association recognition task? Furthermore, whether there will be a self-serving bias in associative recognition memory? To answer these questions, two experiments were carried on.Both experiments adopted DRM paradigm, used positive, negative and neutral emotional words as memory materials, and set three kinds of reference conditions——self, other, and neutral——in the study phase. The only difference between experiment 1 and experiment 2 was the task of test phase: experiment 1 used item recognition task, and participants needed to make “remember/know” judgment for each “old word”; experiment 2 adopted association recognition task, and asked participants to make association recognition judgment on the basis of item recognition, that is, which reference object did each “old word” shown together with in the study phase. The results showed that:(1)The emotional enhancement effect in memory was affected by the type of recognition task. There were emotional enhancement effects on veridical and false memory in item recognition task. There was no emotional enhancement effect on veridical and false memory in association recognition task.(2)The self-reference effect in memory was also affected by the type of recognition task. There were self-reference effects on false memory but not veridical memory in item recognition task. There were self-reference effects on veridical and false memory in association recognition task.(3)There was self-serving bias in associative recognition memory. This self-serving bias not only shown in the false association judgments on old words, but also manifested in many association recognition judgments on falserecognizedlure words.