Abstract
The aim of the present study was to examine how negative emotion and sex affect self-generated errors as in fabrication set-up and later false recognition of those errors. In total, 120 university students volunteered to take part in the study. Participants were assigned at random into two equal sized groups (N = 60) depending on the type of event they received (negative emotional or neutral). We expected that fabrication and false recognition would be enhanced for the emotional event compared to the neutral one. We further hypothesized that both the willingness to fabricate and later false recognition would be enhanced for women compared with men. The results partly confirmed the hypotheses. The results showed that emotional valence (negative) affects both the willingness to fabricate about events that never took place, and the recognition of the fabrication as true at a later point. Women and men were equally likely to fabricate but women were more likely to recognize their fabrication, particularly for the emotional event. The results are discussed in the context of prior work.
Highlights
Studies on forced fabrication, where misinformation is self-generated by the participant, most commonly use a negatively valanced emotional event as the witnessed event [1,2,3,4]
The present study suggests that the difference between negative emotional and neutral events may lie in how the information is processed and organized at encoding, with emotional events more likely to lead to fabrication, but the fabrication likely to be later recognized as true for both emotional and neutral events
Prior work has predominantly used a negative emotional event when studying forced fabrication and false recognition, but studies have shown that the misinformation effect is enhanced for emotional events compared to neutral events
Summary
Studies on forced fabrication, where misinformation is self-generated by the participant, most commonly use a negatively valanced emotional event as the witnessed event [1,2,3,4]. This is understandable given the overall context of witness interrogation. Participants are more prone to incorporate misinformation into their memory for negative compared to neutral or positive events [8,9,10,11] It is unclear, what role negative emotions play when the misinformation is self-generated errors as in forced fabrication. In a typical forced fabrication paradigm, participants watch a video of an event and are later asked questions about it that are true (refer to actual events) or false (refer to something that never happened) [1]
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