No effect of stress on false recognition

The present study aimed to analyze the effect of acute stress on false recognition in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. In this paradigm, lists of words associated with a non-presented critical lure are studied and, in a subsequent memory test, critical lures are often falsely remembered.

In two experiments, participants were randomly assigned to either the stress group (Trier Social Stress Test) or the no-stress control group. Because we sought to control the level-of-processing at encoding, in Experiment 1, participants created a visual mental image for each presented word (deep encoding). In Experiment 2, participants performed a shallow encoding (to respond whether each word contained the letter "o").

The results indicated that, in both experiments, as predicted, heart rate and STAI-S scores increased only in the stress group. However, false recognition did not differ across stress and no-stress groups.

Results suggest that, although psychosocial stress was successfully induced, it does not enhance the vulnerability of individuals with acute stress to DRM false recognition, regardless of the level of processing.