EMOTIONAL FOCUS AND SOURCE MONITORING

Misattributions about the origin of mental experience underlie most me mory distortions and the role that emotion plays in such source monito ring errors is a critical theoretical and practical issue. Three exper iments explored the impact of the direction and target of listeners' e motional focus on their subsequent ability to identify the origin of m emories for statements they had heard. Participants heard an audio tap e (Experiment 1) or watched a video (Experiments 2 and 3) of two peopl e making various statements (e.g., Halloween is becoming a dangerous h oliday). Participants were given tasks that focused them either on how they felt about what was being said or on how they thought the speake rs felt. Self-focus resulted in equal or better recognition for the co ntent of the statements than did Other-focus, but poorer identificatio n of the source of the statements (Experiments 1-3). However, the defi cit of Self-focus relative to Other-focus was eliminated when particip ants focused on how they felt about the speakers rather than on how th ey felt about what was being said (Experiment 3). We suggest that whet her emotional focus is likely to produce confusions among external sou rces of memories depends on whether it reduces the processing that bin ds content with the kinds of perceptual, contextual, and semantic feat ures of external events that are important cues for source. (C) 1996 A cademic Press, Inc.