Seeing You Distorts My Memory
hubie writes:
Adults who frequently worry about being rejected or abandoned by those closest to them are more prone to having false memories when they can see who is conveying the information, a new study suggests.
The authors, SMU's Nathan Hudson and Michigan State University's William J. Chopik, found that adults with attachment anxiety tend to remember details incorrectly more often than people with other personality types, like neuroticism or attachment avoidance.
However, attachment-anxious adults were more likely to get the facts wrong only when they could see the person relaying the information - not when they read or heard the same information, reveals a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
[...] These findings, Hudson said, illustrate how our personalities can potentially affect our memory abilities.
"It's important to understand that our brains don't store verbatim audio or video clips of events that happen to us," he said. "Instead, our brain stores snippets of information about our experiences, and when we attempt to recall a memory, it combines stored bits of related information and makes its best guess about what happened."
"As you might imagine, this process can be quite error-prone," he said.
[...] Previous research has shown that attachment styles can predict a person's likelihood of forgetting certain details, especially ones related to relationships. But this Journal of Personality study is one of the first to show that attachment anxiety actively makes people more inclined to falsely remember events or details that never occurred.
Journal Reference:
Hudson, N. W., & Chopik, W. J. (2022). Seeing you reminds me of things that never happened: Attachment anxiety predicts false memories when people can see the communicator. J Pers Soc Psychol, 2022. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/pspp0000447
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