False memories of emotional events: Depression does not protect against memory distortions

Emotional material generally protects against false memories. Individuals suffering from depressive symptoms tend to focus more on negative information, likely incurring more false memories. In a forensic context, knowledge about memory distortions is often warranted. However, the majority of former false memory studies have been conducted using wordlists. In the present experiment we tested participants’ memory with an ecologically relevant scripted paradigm to measure inferential causal errors in young adults with symptoms of depression, or anxiety problems, versus controls (N = 60). The paradigm consists of the presentation of 8 scripts; each of them includes an effect (negative or neutral) of an action, whose cause is presented only at recognition. We examined whether individuals with depressive symptoms were more prone to produce emotional causal errors. Results showed a positive correlation between depressive symptoms and emotional causal errors (r = .43, p = .001). Both the depressive and anxiety group produced a higher proportion of emotional causal errors than the control group (p < .001), and the depressive group produced more emotional causal errors compared to neutral ones (p < .01).The role of emotions in false memory generation in adolescents with depressive symptoms is discussed.