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Inducing emotionally negative nonbelieved memories using negative pictures

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Abstract

Memories that can be recalled but are no longer believed are termed nonbelieved memories. The current studies examined the creation of emotionally negative nonbelieved memories after viewing negatively valenced pictures. In both experiments, participants took part in two sessions. In Session 1, after being presented with a set of neutral and negative pictures, participants had to rate their emotional state. One week later, in Session 2, participants had to complete a recognition task to identify pictures that had appeared during the previous session. During this task, participants’ memories for some pictures were challenged by telling them that their answers were incorrect in order to evoke nonbelieved memories. The experimental procedure was successful in creating nonbelieved memories in the participants. Specifically, in Experiment 1 (N = 35), we induced nonbelieved true memories for both negative and neutral pictures. We found a significant decrease in both belief and recollection after the challenge, with the change in belief being twice as large as the change in recollection. In Experiment 2 (N = 43), we successfully induced both nonbelieved true and false memories for negative pictures. Again, the reduction of belief was significantly greater than that of recollection. In general, participants evinced better memory for negative pictures, but following challenges people were just as likely to accept false social feedback and change their memories regarding other types of pictures. In both experiments, our challenges did not lead to notable changes in emotional state. In general, our findings show that emotionally negative nonbelieved memories can be successfully evoked in an experimental setting.

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All data are available at https://osf.io/jdu45/.

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Acknowledgements

The paper was supported by a grant of the China Scholarship Council awarded to Chunlin Li.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Law and Criminology, Catholic University of Leuven, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Chunlin Li & Henry Otgaar

  2. Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Chunlin Li, Henry Otgaar, Peter Muris & Yikang Zhang

  3. Department of Psychology, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Peter Muris

  4. Department of Psychology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Jianqin Wang

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  1. Chunlin Li
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Li, C., Otgaar, H., Muris, P. et al. Inducing emotionally negative nonbelieved memories using negative pictures. Mem Cogn 52, 41–56 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-023-01441-3

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