Mood, dissociation and false memories using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott procedure.

Who is likely to have a false memory? Does being in a certain transient state, such as a negative mood, mean that a person is more like to have a false memory? These important questions are examined using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure. The amount of false memories was compared with people's score on a dissociation measure and by mood. Unlike past research, which has used different procedures to explore false memories, we found that dissociation was not associated with false memories. We argue that this is because the DRM procedure requires two processes for a false memory (the generation of the critical lure and mistaking its source), while most false memory procedures only require one process (source monitoring error) because the errant information is suggested to the participant. This pattern of results suggests that only errors with the source monitoring process are associated with dissociation. We found that mood was related to false memories, but it was dependent on the specific task demands. If participants were told to recall as many words as they could, then people in a negative mood had more false memories. However, if they were told to recall as many words as they felt like recalling, then there were more false memories for people in a positive mood. This can be explained by the mood-as-input hypothesis. Results are discussed in relation to both theories and applications of memory.