Emotional focus and source monitoring

Misattributions about the origin of mental experience underlie most memory distortions and the role that emotion plays in such source monitoring errors is a critical theoretical and practical issue. Three experiments explored the impact of the direction and target of listeners' emotional focus on their subsequent ability to identify the origin of memories for statements they had heard. Participants heard an audio tape (Experiment 1) or watched a video (Experiments 2 and 3) of two people making various statements (e.g., Halloween is becoming a dangerous holiday). Participants were given tasks that focused them either on how they felt about what was being said or on how they thought the speakers felt. Self-focus resulted in equal or better recognition for the content of the statements than did Other-focus, but poorer identification of the source of the statements (Experiments 1-3). However, the deficit of Self-focus relative to Other-focus was eliminated when participants focused on how they felt about the speakers rather than on how they felt about what was being said (Experiment 3). We suggest that whether emotional focus is likely to produce confusions among external sources of memories depends on whether it reduces the processing that binds content with the kinds of perceptual, contextual, and semantic features of external events that are important cues for source. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.