Imagination Inflation Study In The Condition Of Mood-congruent Conditions

Imganation inflation is a new field of false memory, the subjects are asked to imagine the things that did not happen or may not happen before, in order to increase the degree of certainty in the imagined events, this process is known as imagination inflation.Imagination inflation is the autobiographical memory, it is closely related to the real memory state of people’s life, it has a better ecological validity compared with the previous laboratory study of false memories, and has high application value in advertisement, justice, education, psychological counseling. But the researchers have proved that the expansion effect is not true existence, it’s a kind of statistical regression. Previous studies are based on influence factor of imagination inflation, such as imagination material, the specific operation, individual differences of the subjects. Due to the study of imagination inflation is in the ascendant,especially has just started in China.Therefore, this paper will verify whether the imagination inflation really exists, as well as some of its characteristics, and explore whether the imagination inflation has the effect of mood consistency through experiments.The research adopted the classical paradigm of the imagination inflation, randomly select 122 students with bachelor degree or above, set four experimental groups:happy group, sadness group, control group with white noise and the control group, the first three experimental groups respectively imagine the three items(positive, negative and neutral events) in the list of LEI. The data are analyzed statistically and come to the conclusions as follows : first of all, the study proved imagination inflation does exist, but posttest LEI tends to be higher than the pretest;then, imagination may not cause imagination inflation, there may is the inhibition of imagination inflation, it can only say that imaging process will cause the imagination inflation in large sample. Finally, the study under mood-congruent conditions shows that participants have imagination inflation more easily about the events of mood congruent, but mood congruent group and neutral white noise group are not statistically significant. Although the state of mind has an effect on the imagination inflation,it is not significance mood-congruent effect.