An interpretive frame model of memory: Effects of social identity activation on recognition, recall, and the false alarms effect

This dissertation comprises three chapters. Chapters two and three are designed to stand alone as documents prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal. Chapter one is an introduction and provides the theoretical background and overview of the experiments presented in this dissertation. Chapter two is a theoretical piece, presenting three studies that assess the extent to which identity activation serves as an interpretive frame that organizes information at encoding and how identity activation at retrieval facilitates recognition of this information, but only for content that is ambiguously associated with the identity. Memory performance thus depends on both activated state at encoding and a-priori association of learned content with the identity. State-congruence effects are observed for information strongly related to gender. Chapter three is also a theoretical piece, reporting two experiments that suggest that identity activation can interfere with the retrieval of identity-related information by encouraging a false alarms effect. Specifically, the activation of social identity at recall absent identity activation at encoding interferes with ability to recall the source of learned content, thereby producing false consumer memories. These effects are further moderated by mood.