Deception Blog

No time to blog properly, but just wanted to draw your attention to a new paper (download via SSRN) on separating true from false memories. Here’s the abstract:

Many people believe that emotional memories (including those that arise in therapy) are particularly likely to represent true events because of their emotional content. But is emotional content a reliable indicator of memory accuracy? The current research assessed the emotional content of participants’ pre-existing (true) and manipulated (false) memories for childhood events. False memories for one of three emotional childhood events were planted using a suggestive manipulation and then compared, a long several subjective dimensions, with other participants’ true memories. On most emotional dimensions (e.g., how emotional was this event for you?), true and false memories were indistinguishable. On a few measures (e.g., intensity of feelings at the time of the event), true memories were more emotional than false memories in the aggregate, yet true and false memories were equally likely to be rated as uniformly emotional. These results suggest that even substantial emotional content may not reliably indicate memory accuracy.

Reference:

• Laney, Cara and Loftus, Elizabeth F. (2008). Emotional Content of True and False Memories. Psychology Press, Vol. 16, No. 5, pp. 500-516, 2008
  Available at SSRN

Hat tip to the ever-interesting Neuroethics and Law Blog.