Negative emotion increases false memory for person/action conjunctions

Two experiments demonstrate that eyewitnesses often falsely recognise an actor performing an action that had actually been performed by someone else, even if the action involves negative emotions and the actor in question had only appeared in emotionally neutral contexts. Participants viewed videos, each involving an actor performing a neutral (e.g. making oatmeal) or negatively valenced (e.g. killing a roach) action, and were asked to remember the events (Experiment 1) or to rate them for valence and arousal (Experiment 2). In both experiments, participants remembered negative actions better than neutral actions. Participants were also especially likely, however, to falsely recognise a different person performing a negative action. Experiment 2 revealed that this effect was modulated by the prior emotional contexts in which an actor had appeared. Participants were still just as likely, however, to falsely recognise an actor who had only appeared in neutral contexts now performing a negative action as they were to falsely recognise this actor performing a different neutral action. These results suggest that even individuals seen only in benign contexts can be falsely remembered as having participated in emotionally charged events (e.g. crimes).