Negative Feelings Cause Skewed Memories
Many people believe that adults are able to recall negative events better than children. Perhaps this is because adults are more likely to react rationally. However, a Cornell study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology presents a second opinion.
The study focused on children 7-11 years old and young adults ages 18-23. The subjects were shown lists of closely related emotional words, with one word missing. For example, “cut, injury, pain, ouch” with the word “hurt” missing. When asked to remember the missing word, the subjects falsely remembered the word as being present in the list.
The study proved that events connected to negative emotions have a tendency of skewing children’s memories, and that recalling characteristics were even worse in adults. This is due to negative emotional experiences triggering low true memory levels and high false memory levels.
According to the scientists involved with this study, when people are involved in a very negative experience, such as a crime, they are not extremely focused, nor do they pay close attention to details. They found that materials which had the highest level of negative emotional content produced the highest levels of false memory.
These findings may be crucial to the legal system, in which many accusations are not based on forensic expertise but on peoples’ memories of what happened. And according to the study, when emotions come into play, it is extremely likely for memories to be distorted.
