Mirandola Chiara, Pazzaglia Francesca
Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.
Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2021 Aug 18;12:714498. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.714498. eCollection 2021.
Emotional valence and working memory ability (WM) affect false memories' production in adults. Whereas a number of studies have investigated the role of emotional valence in children's tendency to produce spontaneous false memories, individual differences in WM have not been previously included. In the current article, we were interested in investigating whether emotion and WM would interact in influencing the propensity to incur inferential false memories for scripted events. Ninety-eight typically developing children (first-, third-, and eighth- graders) were administered the Emotional false memory paradigm - allowing to study false memories for negative, positive, and neutral events - and a WM task. Results showed that regardless of age, valence influenced false memories' production, such that positive events protected against incurring distortions. Furthermore, WM interacted with valence, such that children with higher WM abilities produced fewer false memories for negative events. Concerning confidence judgments, only the youngest group of children claimed to be overconfident when committing false memories for negative and neutral events. Results are discussed in terms of the role of individual differences in higher cognitive abilities interacting with the emotional content of to-be-remembered events.
情绪效价和工作记忆能力（WM）会影响成年人错误记忆的产生。虽然已有多项研究探讨了情绪效价在儿童产生自发错误记忆倾向中的作用，但此前尚未纳入工作记忆的个体差异。在本文中，我们感兴趣的是研究情绪和工作记忆在影响对脚本事件产生推理错误记忆的倾向方面是否会相互作用。对98名发育正常的儿童（一年级、三年级和八年级学生）进行了情绪错误记忆范式测试——用于研究对消极、积极和中性事件的错误记忆——以及一项工作记忆任务。结果表明，无论年龄大小，效价都会影响错误记忆的产生，即积极事件能防止产生扭曲。此外，工作记忆与效价相互作用，即工作记忆能力较高的儿童对消极事件产生的错误记忆较少。关于信心判断，只有最年幼的儿童组在对消极和中性事件产生错误记忆时声称过度自信。我们从更高认知能力的个体差异与待记忆事件的情感内容相互作用的角度对结果进行了讨论。
