The Influence Of Time Stress And Emotion On The False Memory

In the study of memory,the celebrated ideologist Plato had raised the “stencil hypothesis” theory,holding the idea that once people got the impression on one thing,it would not change after the mark was formed,which was the same with the mark formed by putting an angular hard object on a stencil plate.Is the memory in the human brain as accurate as the mark? A large number of studies revealed that memory not only easy to fade away,but also even sometimes changes occurred spontaneously;memory errors were everywhere,which remained us that memory was not an exact copy of the experienced events.This study aims at investigating the influences of different types of emotional stimuli and emotional state on the false memory under time pressure.This study consists of three experiments.Experiment ? attempts to explore the influence of the time pressure on the false memory.The subjects were divided into two groups,namely,the stress group and the control group.The single factor design method between the subjects was utilized.The dependent variable was the number of the false recognition of the critical lures.The results of experiment ? showed that the main effect was remarkable under the time press(F=4.711,p <.05).We showed that the number of the false recognition of the critical lures in the stress group was much higher than that of the control group.Experiment ? wasfurther divided into two small experiments.The first one attempted to find the influences of different emotional stimuli on the false memory under time pressure.The hybrid design method was used,namely,2(time stress: stress group and control group)× 3(word titer: positive word,negative word,and neutral word),the between-subject variable was time pressure,the within-subject variable was word titer,and the dependent variable was the number of the false recognition of the critical lures.The results of experiment ?(a)showed that the main effect was remarkable under the time press(F=7.883,p <0.01),and valence of words(F=8.527,p <0.01).The interaction between time press and valence of words was significant(F=3.078,p < 0.05).Results demonstrated that the number of the false recognition for the subjects in the stress group respecting to the negative critical lures was much higher than those of the neutral and positive ones.The second small experiment tried to uncover the influences of different emotional states on the false memory under time pressure.The design method of 2(time stress: stress group and control group)× 3(emotion titer: positive emotion group,negative emotion group,and neutral group)was used,the dependent variable was the number of the false recognition of the critical lures.The results of experiment ?(b)showed that the main effect was marginal significant under the time press(F=2.968,p=0.087),and the emotion was significant(F=3.825,p < 0.05).The interaction between time press and emotion wassignificant(F=3.306,p<0.05).The results revealed that the false recognition for the subjects in the positive emotion group respecting to the critical lures had the largest number.We conducted experiment ? by combining Experiment?and Experiment ? to investigate the influence of the time stress on the mood-congruent false memory.The hybrid design method of 2(time stress: stress group and control group)× 4(mood type: positive mood-congruency,negative mood-congruency,positive mood-inconsistency,and negative mood-inconsistency)was used.The between-subject variable was time pressure,the within-subject variables were emotional titer and word titer,and the dependent variable was the number of the false recognition of the critical lures.The results of experiment ? showed that the main effect was non-significant under the time press(F=1.117,p>0.05)and the mood type was significant(F=64.043,p<0.01).The interaction between time press and mood type was marginal significant(F=2.188,p =0.091).Results showed that the numbers of the false recognition respecting to the mood-congruency for the subjects in the stress group and the control group were both higher than that of the mood-inconsistency,and the stress group had larger number of the false recognition than that of the control group under the condition of mood-congruency.The study revealed that:1.Time press could promote the false memory;the more was thefalse memory as the increase of the time press.2.Time stress could accelerate the false recognition of the subject on the negative critical lures,and individual negative emotions can undermine the generation of false memories under time pressure.3.Time stress had a positive effect on the negative mood-congruent false memory.