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Publication Date

4-2021

Document Type

Presentation

Presentation Type

Group

Degree Type

Undergraduate

Department

Psychology

Mentor

Dawn McBride

Mentor Department

Psychology

Abstract

The implications of memory and its capacities are far reaching. Our memory is a recollection of facts, events, experiences, and an awareness of our surroundings in an attempt to make sense of our world. Memory and its validity in particular is especially useful in court-room and clinical settings. However, our memory is prone to human error and often times we experience the phenomenon of false memories as a result of the information overload we subject ourselves to on a daily basis. The purpose of the present study was to to investigate the relationship between induced moods, list types, and the overall effect these variables have on false memory in the short term. Participants were instructed to listen to pieces of classical music and were then designated to complete a memory task through the DRM paradigm that experimentally creates simple false memories for words Past studies (e.g., McBride et al., 2019) have shown that at short-term delays, false memories are more frequent for phonological than semantic lists. In addition, it has been found that participants in a positive mood had higher rates of false memories than participants with a negative mood, and the present study aimed to replicate these results. Through our procedure, we hypothesized that participants in a more positive mood would have higher levels of false recognition rates while studying phonological word lists than participants in a negative mood, but expected no difference in false memories in for semantic lists due to the inferiority of semantic information stored for short delays.

Notes

Authors: Hannah Westphal and Amanda Martin

The Interaction Between Mood, Music, And False Short Term Memories
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