Cognitive psychology

Background. Whereas sleep and emotion are important factors affecting false memory, there is a lack of empirical research on the interaction effect of sleep and emotion on false memory. Moreover, it should be investigated further that how the effects of emotion on false memory varies from presenting emotional content to eliciting emotional state.

Objective. To examine how sleep and varying emotional context influence false memories. We predicted that sleep and emotion would interactively affect false memory when participants are presented with negative words in a learning session (Experiment 1) or when their emotional state is induced before a learning session (Experiment 2).

Design. We used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task. Emotional words were used to elicit emotion during learning in Experiment 1 and video clips were used to induce a particular mood state before learning in Experiment 2. Participants were divided into a “sleep group” and a “wake group” and completed an initial learning session either in the evening or in the morning respectively. After a learning session, participants in the sleep group slept at night as usual and completed a recognition test in the morning, while participants in the wake group stayed awake during the daytime and completed their recognition test in the evening. All participants completed a recognition test after the same period of time.

Results. In Experiment 1, the wake group falsely recognized more negative critical lure words than neutral ones, but no such difference existed in the sleep group, suggesting that sleep modulated the emotional effect on false memory. In Experiment 2, participants in either a positive or negative mood state showed more false recognition than those in a neutral state. There was no such difference in the wake group. We conclude that sleep and emotion interactively affect false memory.