The Effect Of Warning Cues On Mood-Congruent False Memory In DRM Paradigm

The study on memory and emotion is one of the most important topics of cognitive psychology. Since Roediger and McDermott created DRM word lists based on the study of Deese in1995, the DRM paradigm has become the most wide-used paradigm in studying false memory. Many researchers focused on how to reduce false memory and they tried to use warning cues to do that. But, they did not get any consistent results. According to these studies, we found that some factors, such as subjective experience of critical lure, implicit activation-spreading process, the content and position of warning cues and strategies participants used, may affect the production of false memory. DRM paradigm only shows one type of human false memory phenomenon. Studies show that mood also has great influence on human memory and this effect is mainly reflected in mood-congruent memory bias. One study found that participants with depression recognized many more depressive words than positive and neutral words, which imply that there may be a kind of relationship between mood and false memory. The relationship can be reflected according to comparing the number of words recognized that have the same valence of the mood and the different valence of moods. We denied this phenomenon as mood-congruent false memory. We are curious about the following two questions:(1) whether or not the phenomenon could be found only in special populations?(2) could the explicit warning cures reduce mood-congruent false memory?We need to create enough DRM word lists with different emotion valences before study1and2because participants need to recognize these word lists in one of the three moods in the study. The process of creating word lists is similar to that of classic word lists. Results showed that these new DRM word lists are reliable and effective in studying false memory. Using the new DRM word lists in study1we found that(1) error recognition rate of positive critical lures in the positive mood is significantly higher than that in the negative and neutral moods, and error recognition rate of negative critical lures in the negative mood is significantly higher than that in the positive and neutral moods.(2)"Remember" judgment of positive critical lures in the positive mood is significantly higher than that in the negative and neutral moods, and "Remember" judgment of negative critical lures in the negative mood is significantly higher than that in the positive and neutral moods. The results of study2were almost the same as those of study1, and additionally, we found that the effect of warning cures was not to reduce mood-congruent false memory but to increase the mood-congruent critical lures. The hypothesis is supported by the result. The results showed that:(1) error recognition rate of positive critical lures in the positive mood was significantly higher than that in the negative and neutral moods and error recognition rate of negative critical lures in the negative mood was significantly higher than that in the positive and neutral moods;(2) warning cue cannot reduce false memory and mood-congruent false memory;(3) participants were inclined to make "remember" judgment to mood-congruent critical lures with or without warning.