Mirandola Chiara, Toffalini Enrico
Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, via Venezia 8, 35131 Padova, Italy.
PLoS One. 2016 Mar 3;11(3):e0148716. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148716. eCollection 2016.
Mood affects both memory accuracy and memory distortions. However, some aspects of this relation are still poorly understood: (1) whether valence and arousal equally affect false memory production, and (2) whether retrieval-related processes matter; the extant literature typically shows that mood influences memory performance when it is induced before encoding, leaving unsolved whether mood induced before retrieval also impacts memory. We examined how negative, positive, and neutral mood induced before retrieval affected inferential false memories and related subjective memory experiences. A recognition-memory paradigm for photographs depicting script-like events was employed. Results showed that individuals in both negative and positive moods-similar in arousal levels-correctly recognized more target events and endorsed fewer false memories (and these errors were linked to remember responses less frequently), compared to individuals in neutral mood. This suggests that arousal (but not valence) predicted memory performance; furthermore, we found that arousal ratings provided by participants were more adequate predictors of memory performance than their actual belonging to either positive, negative or neutral mood groups. These findings suggest that arousal has a primary role in affecting memory, and that mood exerts its power on true and false memory even when induced at retrieval.
情绪会影响记忆的准确性和记忆扭曲。然而，这种关系的一些方面仍未得到充分理解：（1）效价和唤醒是否同样影响错误记忆的产生，以及（2）与检索相关的过程是否重要；现有文献通常表明，当情绪在编码前被诱发时会影响记忆表现，而检索前诱发的情绪是否也会影响记忆仍未解决。我们研究了检索前诱发的消极、积极和中性情绪如何影响推理性错误记忆及相关的主观记忆体验。采用了一种针对描绘类似脚本事件的照片的识别记忆范式。结果显示，与处于中性情绪的个体相比，处于消极和积极情绪（唤醒水平相似）的个体正确识别出更多目标事件，认可的错误记忆更少（并且这些错误与记忆反应的关联频率更低）。这表明唤醒（而非效价）预测了记忆表现；此外，我们发现参与者提供的唤醒评分比他们实际属于积极、消极或中性情绪组更能准确预测记忆表现。这些发现表明，唤醒在影响记忆方面起主要作用，并且即使在检索时诱发情绪，情绪也会对真实和错误记忆产生影响。
