The Influence Of Affect On False Memory

The dominant cognitive processing is reference to the information process in mind that ismost accessible in a particular task. Recent researches on stereotype and counterstereotype,global and local processing, relational and item-specific processing, holistic and analyticreasoning and goal pursuing consistently show that negative affect inhibits the dominantcognitive processing. The inhibitory effect is affected by the clearness of the dominantcognitive processing, the type of negative affect and the connection of both. Studies usingpre-experimental or after-experimental process dissociation procedure implicate that negativeaffect inhibits the dominant cognitive processing through automatic process. Theexplainations of the phenomenon include the affect-as-information theory which has beenwidely used, the behavior approach-inhibition system view and the affective embodimentview.According to present researches, in the area of relational and item-specific processing,the inhibition of negative affect on the dominant cognitive processing is not discussed enough.On the one hand, the researches only focus on the relational processing, missing the situationin which the dominant cognitive processing is the item-specific processing, thus prevent theresult going further to be part of the dominant cognitive processing study. On the other hand,all the researchers presume that the dominant cognitive processing in the memory task is theautomatically activated relational processing, not considering making the dominant cognitiveprocessing clear by priming. Thus, the present study discuss the inhibition of negative affecton relational processing and item-specific processing, aiming to prove that since negativeaffect inhibits the dominant processing, when the dominant processing is relational processing,negative affect will decrease false memory; when the dominant processing is item-specificprocessing, negative affect will increase false memory. Specifically, the first experimentdiscuss whether negative affect will influence false memory by priming relational processingand item-specific processing. The second experiment manipulate the degree of relationalprocessing activation to observe the influence of negative affect on false memory, in order toeliminate the possibility of negative inhibiting the effect of priming. The third experimentchange the false memory paradigm into false exclusion task to exclude the possibility ofparticipants in different cognitive processing having different selection biases. The mainconclusions of the study are as follows: (1) When relational processing is proceeded, the negative participants make less falsememories than positive and neutral participants; when item-specific processing is proceeded,the negative participants make more false memories than positive and neutral participants.(2) In the area of relational processing and item-specific processing, the influence ofnegative affect on false memory is due to the inhibition of negative affect on the dominantcognitive processing.(3) When relational processing and item-specific processing is proceeded, the falsememories of participants in positive and neutral affect don’t show significant variation.