Davis Jolee, Bayantemur Sharon Y, Seecharan Sasha, Unger Leslie D, Hellgren Johanna, Stone Charles B
a John Jay College of Criminal Justice , City University of New York , New York , NY , USA.
b The Graduate Center , City University of New York , New York , NY , USA.
Memory. 2018 Aug;26(7):882-893. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2018.1468468. Epub 2018 Apr 25.
The present study examined the mnemonic consequences of true/false denials and affirmatives on how a listener appraises their personal past. To this end, participants (listeners) rated the extent to which they were confident certain events occurred during their childhood. They rated these events both before and after a confederate (speaker) denied or affirmed the occurrence of four different childhood events each, for a total of eight "rehearsed" events. For each set (denials and affirmatives) of events, half were true and half were false. In turn, this created four types of events (two each): true denials, true affirmatives, false denials, and false affirmatives. Additionally, half of the participants were told that the speaker was provided independent information about the veracity of the event's occurrence ("expert" condition). Overall, listeners were less confident in the occurrence of false denial events, but more so when they believed the speaker to be more knowledgeable of the listeners memories, more confident in false affirmative events and, counter intuitively, more confident in the occurrence of true denial events. These results underscore the importance of a nuanced approach to the mnemonic consequences of true and false denials and affirmations in the course of social interactions.
本研究考察了真假否认和肯定对听众如何评估其个人过去的记忆影响。为此，参与者（听众）对他们确定某些事件在童年时期发生的自信程度进行评分。在一名同谋（说话者）分别否认或肯定四个不同童年事件的发生之前和之后，他们对这些事件进行评分，总共八个“预演”事件。对于每组（否认和肯定）事件，一半是真实的，一半是虚假的。相应地，这产生了四种类型的事件（每种各两个）：真实否认、真实肯定、虚假否认和虚假肯定。此外，一半的参与者被告知说话者获得了关于事件发生真实性的独立信息（“专家”条件）。总体而言，听众对虚假否认事件的发生信心较低，但当他们认为说话者对听众的记忆更了解时信心会增加，对虚假肯定事件更有信心，而且违反直觉的是，对真实否认事件的发生也更有信心。这些结果强调了在社会互动过程中，对真假否认和肯定的记忆影响采取细致入微方法的重要性。
