Abstract
The exposure to relevant social and/or historical events can increase the generation of false memories (FMs). The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a calamity challenging health, political, and journalistic bodies, with media generating confusion that has facilitated the spread of fake news. In this respect, our study aims at investigating the relationships between memories (true memories, TMs vs. FMs) for COVID-19-related news and different individual variables (i.e., use of traditional and social media, COVID-19 perceived and objective knowledge, fear of the disease, depression and anxiety symptoms, reasoning skills, and coping mechanisms). One hundred and seventy-one university students (131 females) were surveyed. Overall, our results suggested that depression and anxiety symptoms, reasoning skills, and coping mechanisms did not affect the formation of FMs. Conversely, the fear of loved ones contracting the infection was found to be negatively associated with FMs. This finding might be due to an empathy/prosociality-based positive bias boosting memory abilities, also explained by the young age of participants. Furthermore, objective knowledge (i) predicted an increase in TMs and decrease in FMs and (ii) significantly mediated the relationships between the use of social media and development of both TMs and FMs. In particular, higher levels of objective knowledge strengthened the formation of TMs and decreased the development of FMs following use of social media. These results may lead to reconsidering the idea of social media as the main source of fake news. This claim is further supported by either the lack of substantial differences between the use of traditional and social media among participants reporting FMs or the positive association between use of social media and levels of objective knowledge. The knowledge about the topic rather than the type of source would make a difference in the process of memory formation.
Highlights
The fabricated or distorted recollection of an event is defined as a false memory (FM).People may remember events that never happened or may remember them differently from how they occurred [1]
Consistent with their findings, we found that fear of COVID-19 increased the true memory (TM) score; we found a negative association between fear that loved ones could contract COVID-19 and the number of FMs
We found that objective knowledge (OK) was significantly associated with both TM and FM
Summary
The fabricated or distorted recollection of an event is defined as a false memory (FM).People may remember events that never happened or may remember them differently from how they occurred [1]. FMs appear to be related to a higher interest in, and engagement with, a certain topic [2,3], which underlines a greater exposure to news on the matter. People would tend to form high-level cognitive reasoning schemes for topics on which they have high knowledge about; such a tendency may represent a protective factor against the development of memory biases [8]. This hypothesis is in accordance with the rationale of the emerging Monitoring Model Framework (MMF) [9,10]. The second system is based on a more systematic approach according to which the contents of the alleged memory are carefully evaluated to verify their plausibility by comparing them with pre-existing knowledge and/or other (dis)confirmative evidence [10]
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