Collaborative recall of details of an emotional film

Abstract

Collaborative inhibition refers to the phenomenon that when several people work together to produce a single memory report, they typically produce fewer items than when the unique items in the individual reports of the same number of participants are combined (i.e., nominal recall). Yet, apart from this negative effect, collaboration may be beneficial in that group members remove errors from a collaborative report. Collaborative inhibition studies on memory for emotional stimuli are scarce. Therefore, the present study examined both collaborative inhibition and collaborative error reduction in the recall of the details of emotional material in a laboratory setting. Female undergraduates (n = 111) viewed a film clip of a fatal accident and subsequently engaged in either collaborative (n = 57) or individual recall (n = 54) in groups of three. The results show that, across several detail categories, collaborating groups recalled fewer details than nominal groups. However, overall, nominal recall produced more errors than collaborative recall. The present results extend earlier findings on both collaborative inhibition and error reduction to the recall of affectively laden material. These findings may have implications for the applied fields of forensic and clinical psychology.

Keywords:

• Collaborative inhibition
• Error pruning
• Detail memory
• Emotion
• Trauma film paradigm

Notes

¹ Initially, 22 and 19 triads were tested in the collaborative and individual condition, respectively. One participant scored well above (i.e., 35) the clinical cut-off score (i.e., 21; Van der Does, 2002) on the BDI-II. In addition, this participant and five others scored higher than the cut-off of 7 (Dekkers et al., 2010) on the TSQ. As high scores may influence recall patterns, protocols of the triads that contained a high scorer (n = 3) and protocols from individually tested high scorers (n = 3) were not coded. For the nominal condition that constituted three individual recall protocols, the recall data of the remaining six participants in the three affected individual triads were considered as two pooled protocols.