This study investigated the influence of affective valence and the typicality of events on their false recognition. Twentynine participants were asked to learn the event list with a positive, negative, or neutral script. In the recognition task, two types of unlearned new critical lure events were presented along with the learned events. One of them was a typical event for the script, and the other was an atypical one. The results showed that false recognition was observed only in the typical lure event. Moreover, false recognition of typical lure was increased when it had positive affective valence and decreased when it had the negative one. These results suggest that the false memory of a stimulus, which constructs a category list structure (e.g., script), is caused by the semantic confusion error occurring during recall. Positive affective valence may encourage the reference to script knowledge in the recognition of the event, and an unexperienced event may be confused semantically in light of typicality of the knowledge.
