Are Some People More Susceptible to False Memories?
Written by Hanna Erceg
Imagine this: You’re walking down the street when someone runs by and steals your phone. Later, the police present four suspects and ask you to identify the thief. You confidently point to Suspect #1, certain that the person who stole your phone was wearing a blue hoodie. However, you’re wrong. The thief was Suspect #2, and they were wearing a red hoodie. So, how did you get such an important detail wrong?
The answer lies in a phenomenon known as false memory—a recollection of an event that feels real, despite being partially or completely inaccurate (Loftus et al., 1978). The consequences of these memory errors can range from harmless mix-ups to serious real-world implications (see Schacter, 2022).
While everyone is susceptible to false memories, some people may be more susceptible than others (Bernstein & Loftus, 2009). In the Lifespan Cognition Lab, we examined whether people who experience frequent and intense negative emotions, like anxiety, sadness, and anger (Connor-Smith & Flachsbart, 2007), were more prone to these memory errors. So, how might experiencing frequent and intense negative emotions increase someone’s susceptibility to false memories?
To answer that, we need to talk about dissociation, which is when thoughts, feelings, and experiences don’t fully connect or flow together in the mind (Bernstein & Putnam, 1986). Dissociation exists on a continuum, ranging from everyday experiences like zoning out during a boring lecture to more severe symptoms seen in dissociative disorders. We predicted that people who experience frequent and intense negative emotions would be more likely to experience dissociative symptoms, like feeling disconnected from their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. This, in turn, might make them more likely to remember things that didn’t actually happen. And,
that is exactly what we found: people who reported experiencing frequent and intense negative emotions were also more likely to report more dissociative symptoms, and those with increased dissociative symptoms were more susceptible to false memories (Erceg et al., 2025).
Interestingly, this effect emerged when people were asked to recognize information but not when they had to recall information on their own. This distinction is important. Recognition tasks (like multiple-choice questions) give people helpful cues and rely on both remembering specific details and having a general sense that something feels familiar. On the other hand, free recall tasks (like reciting a poem) require retrieving information without cues and rely less on feelings of familiarity. We suspect dissociation might make it more difficult for people to tell the difference between something that feels familiar and something that actually happened. This may explain why the effect only occurred in recognition tasks.
So, what’s the takeaway? Well, our research suggests that people who experience frequent and intense negative emotions may be more susceptible to false memories possibly because they feel more disconnected from their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Our work suggests that this finding is especially true in situations that rely on recognition. However, it’s important to remember that this was just one study. More research is needed to fully understand how frequent and intense negative emotions, dissociation, and false memory susceptibility are connected. Hopefully, future research will help clarify how and why they interact.
Interested in learning more? You can read the full manuscript here: https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000218
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References
Bernstein, D. M., & Loftus, E. F. (2009). How to tell if a particular memory is true or false. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(4), 370–374. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01140.x
Bernstein, E. M., & Putnam, F. W. (1986). Development, reliability, and validity of a dissociation scale. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 174(12), 727–735. https://doi.org/10.1097/00005053-198612000-00004
Connor-Smith, J. K., & Flachsbart, C. (2007). Relations between personality and coping: A meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(6), 1080–1107. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93 .6.1080
Erceg, H. G., Matsuba, M. K., Scoboria, A., & Bernstein, D. M. (2025). Dissociation mediates the link between negative emotionality and false memory. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000218
Loftus, E. F., Miller, D. G., & Burns, H. J. (1978). Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(1), 19-31. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.4.1.19
Schacter, D. L. (2022). Memory sins in applied settings: What kind of progress? Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 11(4), 445–460. https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000078
Disclaimer
The blog posts are for informational and educational purposes only. The posts should not be considered as any type of advice (medical, mental health, legal, and/or religious advice). All blog posts have been researched, written, and edited by the undergraduate students and alumni of the Lifespan Cognition Lab. As a teaching and research-based lab, we encourage all lab members to help make knowledge more accessible to all communities through these posts.
