Associated Effects Of Emotional Lure Words, False Recognition Experimental Study

Memory illusion is increasing attracting many interesting of researches, of which the relatedness effects is the main focus. They studied systematically on the influential factors and put forward some theory interpretations on the relatedness effects including the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis which successfully explains this kind of memory illusion.Four experiments were conducted to explore whether emotional lures can show the false memory effects after participants studied lists containing semantic, phonetic or pictophonetic associates of either emotional or nonemotional critical lures. The main results are:1. The relatedness effects is comparatively robust ,no matter the lures are negative, positive or neutral. It also shows that studying those associates would enhance semantic, but not perceptual processing of lures which verifies the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis.2, Compared with those emotional lures and associations in the unrelated lists, participants produce significant false recognition of emotional lures, even though initially no emotional lures appeared in the phonetic or pictophonetic relatedness effects.3, Participants show no significant difference to the emotional and nonemotional lures after studying phonetic or pictophonetic associations of single character Chinese, while phonetic relatedness effects of two-character Chinese words in the phonetic shows. This result reviews that the distinctiveness words is related to the intensity of emotion. Participants may use distinctiveness of words to make correct judgment if the emotional color is intensified.4, The false recognition to the lures are very low in phonetic relatedness effects , while in pictophonetic relatedness effects the false recognition is almost double. The reason is that the lures are phonetic and graphemic related to the associations.