The Impact of Emotional Narratives on the Phenomena of False Memory

We studied whether emotional stories make people more likely to have "false memories" - remembering things that never happened. This matters for eyewitness testimony and legal cases. We had 70 students read emotional or neutral stories in Bangla, then tested their memory. Surprisingly, people who read emotional stories (both positive and negative) had fewer false memories and better accurate recall than those reading neutral stories. This contradicts previous research using word lists. Our findings suggest that when emotional information appears in meaningful story contexts - like real life - it actually protects memory accuracy rather than distorting it.本研究旨在探究情感叙事是否会提升个体产生‘错误记忆（false memories）’——即回忆起从未发生过的事件——的概率。该研究主题与目击者证词及司法案件息息相关。我们招募70名学生阅读孟加拉语（Bangla）撰写的情感类或中性类叙事文本，随后对其记忆表现进行测试。令人意外的是，相较于阅读中性叙事的受试者，阅读情感叙事（涵盖正向与负向情感）的受试者产生的错误记忆更少，准确回忆率更高。该结果与此前基于词汇列表开展的相关研究结论相悖。本研究结果表明，当情感信息以富有意义的叙事语境呈现时——正如现实生活中的场景——其非但不会破坏记忆准确性，反而能够对其起到保护作用。