Do Emotion Words Create More False Memories than Neutral Words? | RISE Research

This paper investigates whether emotionally charged words generate more false memories than neutral words, and whether gender influences this effect, using the well-established Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. It starts from the premise that memory is reconstructive rather than a literal replay, so recollection is shaped by semantic association, contextual inference and emotional state, leaving it prone to distortion. In the study, 53 adolescent participants aged 14-18 completed an online recognition task built from six randomised DRM word lists presented as short videos, followed by a 48-item recognition test containing studied words, critical lures and unrelated distractors. The results show that negatively valenced lists produced the highest false-memory rates, followed by positive and then neutral lists, while correct recognition (hit rates) was highest for positive words and lowest for neutral ones. Discrimination scores were strongest for positive lists, indicating better ability to separate studied from unstudied items, whereas negative lists increased reliance on gist-based processing, the mechanism the paper identifies as driving emotional false memories. Analysis across gender revealed no significant differences, suggesting comparable performance for male and female participants. The paper's focus is on how emotional valence, particularly negative emotion and arousal, interacts with the associative and gist-oriented processes that underlie false recognition, extending a paradigm that has traditionally relied on neutral stimuli. It draws out implications for educational, legal and media contexts, where understanding when and why people confidently remember things that did not occur carries real practical weight, especially for emotionally significant material. Overall, the paper contributes adolescent-specific evidence to a literature dominated by adult samples, sharpening understanding of when emotionally charged material is most likely to distort what young people confidently remember.