Abstract
Studies have shown a direct link between memory for emotionally salient experiences and false memories. In particular, emotionally arousing material of negative and positive valence enhanced reality monitoring compared to neutral material since emotional stimuli can be encoded with more contextual details and thereby facilitate the distinction between presented and imagined stimuli. Individuals with schizophrenia appear to be impaired in both reality monitoring and memory for emotional experiences. However, the relationship between the emotionality of the to-be-remembered material and false memory occurrence has not yet been studied. In this study, 24 patients and 24 healthy adults completed a false memory task with everyday episodes composed of 12 photographs that depicted positive, negative, or neutral outcomes. Results showed how patients with schizophrenia made a higher number of false memories than normal controls (p < 0.05) when remembering episodes with positive or negative outcomes. The effect of valence was apparent in the patient group. For example, it did not affect the production causal false memories (p > 0.05) resulting from erroneous inferences but did interact with plausible, script consistent errors in patients (i.e., neutral episodes yielded a higher degree of errors than positive and negative episodes). Affective information reduces the probability of generating causal errors in healthy adults but not in patients suggesting that emotional memory impairments may contribute to deficits in reality monitoring in schizophrenia when affective information is involved.
Highlights
Cognitive deficits are core features of schizophrenia and their role is crucial, in terms of prognosis and functional disability [1, 2]
The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of affective information on false memory in patients with schizophrenia
Schizophrenia patients generally made more errors than healthy controls but both groups made fewer errors when episodes contained affective outcomes, consistent with the results of many studies that show how affectively charged material is remembered with fewer distortions than neutral material [18, 25, 45]
Summary
Cognitive deficits are core features of schizophrenia and their role is crucial, in terms of prognosis and functional disability [1, 2]. Memory seems to be one of the most impaired cognitive functions, with deficits in semantic and episodic memories [3]. Forgetting and memory distortions such as false memories have received much attention [4,5,6,7]. False memories have contributed to our understanding of normal memory function, the importance of qualitative features during the encoding and retrieval of complex memories [e.g., Ref. [8]], memory failure in specific brain diseases [e.g., Ref. [9]], and clinically relevant memory distortions in certain patient populations [e.g., Ref. False memories have contributed to our understanding of normal memory function, the importance of qualitative features during the encoding and retrieval of complex memories [e.g., Ref. [8]], memory failure in specific brain diseases [e.g., Ref. [9]], and clinically relevant memory distortions in certain patient populations [e.g., Ref. [10]].
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