Illusory recall of vocal affect.

Illusions of memory occur when a person recalls something that did not take place, and may result from processes that systematically bias recall. This paper reports three experiments exploring a novel form of memory bias that can occur when a person is attempting to recall the affective tone of voice in which someone spoke previously. Subjects first studied photographs of faces while listening to sentences spoken in a positive or negative tone of voice. At test, subjects saw brief presentations of faces and were asked to recall the tone of voice in which the pictured person had spoken earlier. Across a variety of study and test conditions a strong recall bias was observed: when faces conveyed either subtle positive or negative affect, subjects tended to recall the pictured person as having spoken with a matching affective tone, regardless of the tone of voice in which the person had actually spoken. It is proposed that this affective recall bias may be the product of a retrieval mechanism that relies on a combination of information from the memory trace and retrieval environment to guide responding.