Emotion and memory: the role of facilitated episodic memory on memory errors

Abstract: The present study investigated whether emotions influence participants' memory judgements. A special attention was paid to episodic memory. The experiment investigated participants' memory for faces and its main goal was to study whether facilitated episodic memory could lead to a lowered susceptibility to memory errors especially in regard to negative faces. The experiment consisted of two blocks: a black-and-white block that was a simple recognition test, and a colour block that was a source memory test. The main idea was that tendency to temporal context confusion (TCC) had to decrease as a function of episodic memory. The present study measured episodic memory with the help of a source memory test. Based on previous research that showed facilitated episodic memory for negative faces in a recognition test, a decrease in TCC for negative stimuli was predicted. Reliable TCC was observed for all types of faces and even greater for negative faces. However, since there was no improved source memory performance for negative stimuli, the present study does not allow a conclusive test of the idea that episodic memory may lower the susceptibility to memory errors.