Are emotionally charged lures immune to false memory?

Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott task and E. Tulving's (1985) remember-kn ow judgments for recognition memory, the authors explored whether emotional words can show the false memory effect. Participants studied lists contain ing nonemotional, orthographic associates (e.g., Cape, tape, ripe: part, pe rk dark) of either emotional (e.g., rape) or nonemotional (e.g., park) crit ical lures. This setup produced significant false "remembering" of emotiona l lures, even though initially no emotional words appeared at study. When 3 emotional nonlure words appeared at study, emotional-lure false recognitio n more than doubled. However, when these 3 study words also appeared on the recognition test, false memory for the emotional lures was reduced. Across experiments, participants misremembered nonemotional lures more often than they did emotional lures, but they were more likely to rate emotional lure s as "remembered," once they had been recognized as "old." The authors disc uss findings in light of J. J. Freyd and D. H Gleave's (1996) criticisms of this task.