Emotional Elaboration and Eyewitness Error

Abstract

Memory’s malleability has long been a problem for the pursuit of justice. Many factors can harm memory accuracy. One of these is emotional elaboration – the recalling of information in an emotional context. Prior literature has explored the effect of negative emotional elaboration, but the effects of positive elaboration have not been explored – until now. One hundred forty-five subjects from a large western US university viewed a 50-slide stimulus depicting an interaction between a young couple, Seth and Christina. After viewing the stimulus, subjects elaborated on both true and false aspects of it in either a positive, negative, or non-emotional frame. All conditions were compared to non-elaborating, non-misinformed controls. Positive elaboration subjects showed higher rates of false memories than did negative elaborators. However, this study failed to replicate a significant additive effect of negative emotional elaboration above and beyond non-emotional elaboration. Implications are discussed, as are future directions for research at the intersection of emotional elaboration and eyewitness memory errors.