AN INVESTIGATION OF FALSE MEMORIES IN ANXIOUS AND FEARFUL INDIVIDUALS

Abstract

The present study applied the Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory paradigm to examine whether anxious and fearful individuals exhibit higher recall and recognition rates of never presented threat words than nonanxious individuals. In Study 1, 39 spider fearful individuals, 28 blood fearful individuals, and 41 nonfearful individuals learned four word lists associated with unpresented target words: “spider”, “blood”, “river”, and “music”. Regardless of whether participants completed only a recognition task or a recall task and then a recognition task, there were no differences as a function of group in the degree to which they falsely remembered unpresented target threat words. In Study 2, 48 socially anxious and 51 nonanxious individuals learned four lists associated with social/evaluative threat unpresented target words and four lists associated with neutral unpresented target words. Similar to the findings from Study 1, groups did not differ in the degree to which they falsely remembered target words. These findings add to an increasingly large literature suggesting that anxious individuals are not characterized by a memory bias toward threat.