False Memories

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"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory."
Albert Schweitzer
The statement by Albert Schweitzer touches the intrusive topic of the reliability of memory. Relatedly, Bernstein and Loftus (2009) state that “in essence, all memory is false to some degree. Memory is inherently a reconstructive process, whereby we piece together the past to form a coherent narrative that becomes our autobiography”. Even with reference to Bernstein and Loftus (2009), that all memory is false to some degree, there is a phenomenon that psychology refers to as bad or false memory. It was studied as early as Freud (1896). To be differentiated with memory errors, false memories refer to experienced memories of events that did actually never happen …show more content…

But, this very capacity for creativity makes us vulnerable to having false memories". Correspondingly, Hyman and Billings (1998) found predictive power of scores of the Creative Imagination Scale with regards to the creation of false memories. The combination of actual memories with suggestions that we receive from our surrounding leads to the formation of false memories. Confusion regarding the source of these pieces of information might occur during this process and a dissociation of sources takes place. Accordingly, false memories are attributed to flawed reality monitoring processes whereby information that was retrieved from encoding stage and retention interval gets confounded (Johnson & Raye, …show more content…

Loftus and Palmer (1974) conducted a first major behavioural study regarding this topic. There, the authors focused on the reconstruction of memory about accidents. They performed experiments where questions to elicit speed judgments where differently phrased (they used smashed into, hit, collided, bumped, and contacted). Participants watched various videos of accidents, each one with varying speed, and subsequently answered questions about the speed of two colliding cars. Results revealed that the actual speed of the vehicles controlled less variance than the phrasing of the

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