University of Plymouth, Plymouth PL4 8AA, England.
Mem Cognit. 2010 Mar;38(2):142-53. doi: 10.3758/MC.38.2.142.
Does familiarity arise from direct access to memory representations (a mnemonic account) or from inferences and diagnostic cues (an attributional account)? These theoretically distinct explanations can be difficult to distinguish in practice, as is shown by the positivity effect, the increase in feelings of familiarity that accompanies positive emotion. Experiment 1 manipulated mnemonic and attributional sources of positivity via word valence and physical expressions of emotion, respectively. Both sources influenced the tendency to call items old, but receiver-operating characteristic analysis revealed a change in accuracy only with the mnemonic source. To further contrast the mnemonic and attributional accounts, Experiment 2 varied the ratio of positive to neutral words. A higher proportion of positive words exaggerated the pattern of increased old judgments and decreased accuracy for positive words, relative to neutral ones, consistent with the mnemonic account but inconsistent with the attributional account.
熟悉感是源于对记忆表象的直接访问（记忆论解释），还是源于推理和诊断线索（归因论解释）？如正性效应所表明的，正性情绪会伴随熟悉感的增强，这两种在理论上有区别的解释在实际中很难区分。实验 1 通过单词的正性效价和情绪的身体表达分别操纵了记忆论和归因论的正性来源。这两个来源都影响了将项目判断为“旧”的倾向，但接收者操作特征分析仅显示出记忆论来源的准确性变化。为了进一步对比记忆论和归因论解释，实验 2 改变了正性词和中性词的比例。相对于中性词，更多的正性词会夸大对正性词做出“旧”判断的增加模式，同时降低对正性词的判断准确性，这与记忆论解释一致，而与归因论解释不一致。
