Veridical and false memory for scenic material in posttraumatic stress disorder

Associations between the misinformation effect, trauma exposure and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and depression

This research aimed to conduct an initial investigation into the relationships between the "misinformation effect" and trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. Study 1 was a pilot study developing an online misinformation paradigm that could assess the influence of emotion and arousal on memory distortions. Participants (n = 162, M_age = 39.90; SD = 10.90) were recruited through TurkPrime. In Study 2 community members (n = 116, M_age = 28.96; SD = 10.33) completed this misinformation paradigm and measures of trauma exposure, PTSD, and depression. Study 1 found memory for central details was better for high-arousal than low-arousal and neutral-arousal images. Peripheral memory appeared worse for negative and neutral images than positive images. Study 2 found that, when controlling for age and gender, PTSD symptoms significantly predicted proportion of correct responses on control items. However, there was no evidence to indicate that trauma exposure, PTSD symptoms nor depression symptoms, were associated with proportion of correct responses on misled items. Valence and arousal did not influence these associations. These findings have important implications in clinical and legal contexts where individuals with a history of trauma, or who are experiencing symptoms of PTSD or depression, are often required to recall emotionally-laden events. There is a surprising dearth of research into the misinformation effect in clinical populations and further research is required.

Memory bias and its association with memory function in women with posttraumatic stress disorder

BACKGROUND

Memory abnormalities are among a central feature of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is suggested that individuals with PTSD exhibit memory bias; while evidence shows poor memory function in these individuals. We aimed to examine memory bias in PTSD patients relative to controls and to explore an association between memory bias and memory function.

METHODS

Forty-six women with DSM-IV PTSD, most of whom developed the disorder after interpersonal violence, and 68 non-trauma-exposed healthy control women were studied. Memory bias was assessed by a recognition memory task using negative, neutral, and positive words. Memory function was assessed by a standardized neuropsychological test battery. Depression and anxiety symptoms were assessed by self-report measures.

RESULTS

Compared to controls, patients showed significantly greater negative bias scores (i.e., correctly recognized rates for negative words minus those for neutral words) and poorer memory function. Negative bias scores were significantly correlated with worse memory function in patients. When patients were divided into those with lower vs. normal memory function, the former patients had significantly greater negative bias than the latter patients and controls. Memory bias scores in patients were not significantly correlated with depression or anxiety symptoms, nor were they significantly different between patients with comorbid major depressive disorder and those without.

LIMITATIONS

The cross-sectional design and absence of the trauma-exposed non-PTSD group limited our findings.

CONCLUSIONS

PTSD patients have greater negative memory bias, which can be associated with poorer memory function. Our findings may provide an insight into the nature of memory abnormalities in PTSD.

The semantics of emotion in false memory

The emotional valence of target information has been a centerpiece of recent false memory research, but in most experiments, it has been confounded with emotional arousal. We sought to clarify the results of such research by identifying a shared mathematical relation between valence and arousal ratings in commonly administered normed materials. That relation was then used to (a) decide whether arousal as well as valence influences false memory when they are confounded and to (b) determine whether semantic properties that are known to affect false memory covary with valence and arousal ratings. In Study 1, we identified a quadratic relation between valence and arousal ratings of words and pictures that has 2 key properties: Arousal increases more rapidly as function of negative valence than positive valence, and hence, a given level of negative valence is more arousing than the same level of positive valence. This quadratic function predicts that if arousal as well as valence affects false memory when they are confounded, false memory data must have certain fine-grained properties. In Study 2, those properties were absent from norming data for the Cornell-Cortland Emotional Word Lists, indicating that valence but not arousal affects false memory in those norms. In Study 3, we tested fuzzy-trace theory's explanation of that pattern: that valence ratings are positively related to semantic properties that are known to increase false memory, but arousal ratings are not. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Metacognitive Training for Depression (D-MCT) reduces false memories in depression. A randomized controlled trial

Metacognitive Training for Depression (D-MCT) is a highly standardized group program targeted at depression-related (“Beckian”) emotional as well as cognitive biases, including mood-congruent and false memory. While prior results are promising with respect to psychopathological outcomes (depression), it is unclear whether D-MCT also meets its goal of improving cognitive biases, such as false memories.

In the framework of a randomized controlled trial (registered trial, DRKS00007907), we investigated whether D-MCT is superior to an active control condition (health training, HT) in reducing the susceptibility of depressed patients for false memories. False memories were examined using parallel versions of a visual variant of the Deese-Roediger McDermott paradigm.

Both groups committed less false memories at post assessment after 4 weeks compared to baseline. Relative to HT, D-MCT led to a significant decrease in high-confident false memories over time.

The study presents first evidence that D-MCT decreases the susceptibility of depressed patients for false memories, particularly for errors made with high confidence that are presumably the most “toxic” in terms of mood-congruent memory distortions.

What Drives False Memories in Psychopathology? A Case for Associative Activation

In clinical and court settings, it is imperative to know whether posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression may make people susceptible to false memories. We conducted a review of the literature on false memory effects in participants with PTSD, a history of trauma, or depression. When emotional associative material was presented to these groups, their levels of false memory were raised relative to those in relevant comparison groups. This difference did not consistently emerge when neutral or nonassociative material was presented. Our conclusion is supported by a quantitative comparison of effect sizes between studies using emotional associative or neutral, nonassociative material. Our review suggests that individuals with PTSD, a history of trauma, or depression are at risk for producing false memories when they are exposed to information that is related to their knowledge base.

Overdistribution illusions: Categorical judgments produce them, confidence ratings reduce them

Overdistribution is a form of memory distortion in which an event is remembered as belonging to too many episodic states, states that are logically or empirically incompatible with each other. We investigated a response formatting method of suppressing 2 basic types of overdistribution, disjunction and conjunction illusions, which parallel some classic illusions in the judgment and decision making literature. In this method, subjects respond to memory probes by rating their confidence that test cues belong to specific episodic states (e.g., presented on List 1, presented on List 2), rather than by making the usual categorical judgments about those states. The central prediction, which was derived from the task calibration principle of fuzzy-trace theory, was that confidence ratings should reduce overdistribution by diminishing subjects' reliance on noncompensatory gist memories. The data of 3 experiments agreed with that prediction. In Experiment 1, there were reliable disjunction illusions with categorical judgments but not with confidence ratings. In Experiment 2, both response formats produced reliable disjunction illusions, but those for confidence ratings were much smaller than those for categorical judgments. In Experiment 3, there were reliable conjunction illusions with categorical judgments but not with confidence ratings. Apropos of recent controversies over confidence-accuracy correlations in memory, such correlations were positive for hits, negative for correct rejections, and the 2 types of correlations were of equal magnitude. (PsycINFO Database Record

False Memory in Adults With ADHD: A Comparison Between Subtypes and Normal Controls

OBJECTIVES

To examine the performance on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott task of adults divided into ADHD subtypes and compares their performance to that of healthy controls to examine whether adults with ADHD are more susceptible to the production of false memories under experimental conditions.

METHOD

A total of 128 adults with ADHD (50% females), classified into three Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; DSM-IV-TR) subtypes, were compared with 48 controls.

RESULTS

The results indicated that the ADHD participants recalled and recognized fewer studied words than the controls, the ADHD groups produced more false memories than the control group, no differences in either the false positives or the false negatives. The ADHD-combined (ADHD-CT) group recognized significantly more critical words than the control, ADHD-predominantly inattentive (ADHD-IA), and ADHD-predominantly hyperactive-impulsive (ADHD-HI) groups. The ADHD groups recalled and recognized more false positives, were more confident in their false responses, and displayed more knowledge corruption than the controls. The ADHD-CT group recalled and recognized more false positives than the other ADHD groups.

CONCLUSION

The adults with ADHD have more false memories than the controls and that false memory formation varied with the ADHD subtypes.

Interpersonal violence in posttraumatic women: brain networks triggered by trauma-related pictures

Interpersonal violence (IPV) is one of the most frequent causes for the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in women. Trauma-related triggers have been proposed to evoke automatic emotional responses in PTSD. The present functional magnetic resonance study investigated the neural basis of trauma-related picture processing in women with IPV-PTSD (n = 18) relative to healthy controls (n = 18) using a newly standardized trauma-related picture set and a non-emotional vigilance task. We aimed to identify brain activation and connectivity evoked by trauma-related pictures, and associations with PTSD symptom severity. We found hyperactivation during trauma-related vs neutral picture processing in both subcortical [basolateral amygdala (BLA), thalamus, brainstem] and cortical [anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), insula, occipital cortex] regions in IPV-PTSD. In patients, brain activation in amygdala, ACC, insula, occipital cortex and brainstem correlated positively with symptom severity. Furthermore, connectivity analyses revealed hyperconnectivity between BLA and dorsal ACC/mPFC. Results show symptom severity-dependent brain activation and hyperconnectivity in response to trauma-related pictures in brain regions related to fear and visual processing in women suffering from IPV-PTSD. These brain mechanisms appear to be associated with immediate responses to trauma-related triggers presented in a non-emotional context in this PTSD subgroup.

Associative memory impairment in acute stress disorder: characteristics and time course

Stress and episodic memory impairment have previously been associated. Acute stress disorder (ASD) is a maladaptive stress response, which develops in some individuals following traumatic life events. Recently, the authors demonstrated a specific deficit in associative memory for emotionally neutral stimuli in ASD and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This study further tested the relationship between this memory impairment and the course of ASD. We assessed new learning and memory for item and associative information in patients diagnosed with ASD (n=14) and matched trauma naïve controls (n=14). Memory performance and posttraumatic symptoms were examined for approximately 1 and 10 week periods following the traumatic experience. In the two experiments, participants studied a list of stimuli pairs (verbal or visual) and were then tested for their memory of the items (item recognition test), or for the association between items in each pair (associative recognition test). In both experiments, ASD patients showed a marked associative memory deficit compared to the control group. After 10 weeks, ASD symptoms were resolved in most patients. Interestingly, their performance on associative recognition for verbal stimuli improved, while the associative deficit for visual stimuli remained unchanged. Potential mechanisms underlying such an associative memory deficit in post-trauma patients are discussed.

Impact of emotionality on memory and meta-memory in schizophrenia using video sequences

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

A vast amount of memory and meta-memory research in schizophrenia shows that these patients perform worse on memory accuracy and hold false information with strong conviction compared to healthy controls. So far, studies investigating these effects mainly used traditional static stimulus material like word lists or pictures. The question remains whether these memory and meta-memory effects are also present in (1) more near-life dynamic situations (i.e., using standardized videos) and (2) whether emotionality has an influence on memory and meta-memory deficits (i.e., response confidence) in schizophrenia compared to healthy controls.

METHOD

Twenty-seven schizophrenia patients and 24 healthy controls were administered a newly developed emotional video paradigm with five videos differing in emotionality (positive, two negative, neutral, and delusional related). After each video, a recognition task required participants to make old-new discriminations along with confidence ratings, investigating memory accuracy and meta-memory deficits in more dynamic settings.

RESULTS

For all but the positively valenced video, patients recognized fewer correct items compared to healthy controls, and did not differ with regard to the number of false memories for related items. In line with prior findings, schizophrenia patients showed more high-confident responses for misses and false memories for related items but displayed underconfidence for hits when compared to healthy controls, independent of emotionality.

LIMITATIONS

Limited sample size and control group; combined valence and arousal indicator for emotionality; general psychopathology indicator.

CONCLUSIONS

Emotionality differentially moderated memory accuracy, biases in schizophrenia patients compared to controls. Moreover, the meta-memory deficits identified in static paradigms also manifest in more dynamic settings near-life settings and seem to be independent of emotionality.