title: Negative affect promotes encoding of and memory for details at the expense of the gist: affect, encoding, and false memories.
abstract: I investigated whether negative affective states enhance encoding of and memory for item-specific information reducing false memories. Positive, negative, and neutral moods were induced, and participants then completed a Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false-memory task. List items were presented in unique spatial locations or unique fonts to serve as measures for item-specific encoding. The negative mood conditions had more accurate memories for item-specific information, and they also had fewer false memories. The final experiment used a manipulation that drew attention to distinctive information, which aided learning for DRM words, but also promoted item-specific encoding. For the condition that promoted item-specific encoding, false memories were reduced for positive and neutral mood conditions to a rate similar to that of the negative mood condition. These experiments demonstrated that negative affective cues promote item-specific processing reducing false memories. People in positive and negative moods encode events differently creating different memories for the same event.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Queens College - CUNY, Flushing, NY 11367, USA. justin.storbeck@qc.cuny.edu
authors.forename: Justin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Storbeck
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D011939:Mental Recall; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012094:Repression, Psychology