Emotion and false memory: How goal-irrelevance can be relevant for what people remember

ABSTRACT

Elaborating on misleading information concerning emotional events can lead people to form false memories. The present experiment compared participants’ susceptibility to false memories when they elaborated on information associated with positive versus negative emotion and pregoal versus postgoal emotion. Pregoal emotion reflects appraisals that goal attainment or failure is anticipated but has not yet occurred (e.g., hope and fear). Postgoal emotion reflects appraisals that goal attainment or failure has already occurred (e.g., happiness and devastation). Participants watched a slideshow depicting an interaction between a couple and were asked to empathise with the protagonist's feelings of hope (positive pregoal), happiness (positive postgoal), fear (negative pregoal), or devastation (negative postgoal); in control conditions, no emotion was mentioned. Participants were then asked to reflect on details of the interaction that had occurred (true) or had not occurred (false), and that were relevant or irrelevant to the protagonist's goal. Irrespective of emotional valence, participants in the pregoal conditions were more susceptible to false memories concerning goal-irrelevant details than were participants in the other conditions. These findings support the view that pregoal emotions narrow attention to information relevant to goal pursuit, increasing susceptibility to false memories for irrelevant information.

KEYWORDS:

• False memory
• emotion
• misinformation
• motivation
• valence
• goal-relevance

Acknowledgements

This research was carried out at the University of California, Irvine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The present study was not aimed at investigating the effect of elaboration on (false) memory per se, as this has already repeatedly been demonstrated by Zaragoza and colleagues (Drivdahl & Zaragoza, 2001; Drivdahl et al., 2009; Lane & Zaragoza, 2007; Zaragoza et al., 2011).

2. This hypothesis was tentative. Narrowing attention to particular features of an event implies that the other features will not receive attention, leading to poor memory. However, attention narrowing does not necessarily enhance memory for attended information (Van Damme & Smets, 2014; Wessel & Merckelbach, 1997).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Research Foundation—Flanders (travel grant and postdoctoral fellowship of the first author).