Abstract
The present study investigated whether retrieval-induced forgetting of emotional false memories can occur. Participants (N=47) learned 18 associatively structured lists. Each list consisted of 14 words that were strongly associated with a critical word that did not appear during learning. The critical words varied with valence (neutral, negative, or positive). After learning the list words, participants retrieved some list words of each valence from half of the lists, through a word-fragment recall test. Finally, participants were given a free-recall test. We divided the participants to a low-frequency group and a high-frequency group, on the basis of false recall rate on baseline condition. The free recall test showed that false recall of neutral critical words was more frequent than that of both negative and positive critical words. Furthermore, the high-frequency group only showed retrieval-induced forgetting of critical words, regardless of valence. Thus, the retrieval of a memory induced forgetting of false memories regardless of valence. Accordingly, we propose that valence reduces the frequencies of false memories but does not affect on retrieval-induced forgetting of false memories.
