How reliable are your memories?\u00a0 Before I took Cognitive Psych, I never considered this question.\u00a0 In fact, I assumed that most of what I remembered was true, even things from my early childhood.\u00a0 Now that I know about suggestibility, I have begun to second-guess what I know about many of my past experiences.\u00a0 Suggestibility occurs when, without realizing it, we include information from others in our memories.\u00a0 This can lead to changes in memories, and sometimes the creation of non- experienced, or \u201cfalse\u201d memories.<\/p>\n
There are two basic types of suggestions.\u00a0 A personalized suggestion is one that indicates that something may have happened specifically to you in the past.\u00a0 General suggestions, on the other hand, suggest that something happened to many people in the past.\u00a0 For example, a personalized suggestion could involve your grandmother saying, \u201cyou always used to wear those green overalls when you came to visit me,\u201d while a generalized suggestion may involve reading a magazine article that says green overalls were very popular among children in the late 1990s.\u00a0 Research has shown that personalized suggestions create false autobiographical memories, which can affect behavior.\u00a0 Memories are very important in guiding our behavior.\u00a0 For example, if you remember a negative event associated with a certain place, you are more likely to avoid that place in the future.\u00a0 Generalized suggestions guide behavior as well, but not through false memories.\u00a0 In this case, a person may hear that something happened to others in the past and adjust their behavior to avoid experiencing it.\u00a0 For example, if you learned that many people got sick from eating raw cookie dough, you might avoid sampling the batter when making cookies so as not to get sick yourself.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is well known that suggestibility has an impact on our behavior, but a recent study wanted to take a closer look at this.\u00a0 Scoboria, Mazzoni, Jarry, and Bernstein (2012) compared the effects of personalized and general suggestions to examine how and why different types of suggestibility influence behavior. \u00a0They used general and personal suggestions about a negative past experience with peach yogurt to look at suggestibility\u2019s impact on attitudes and behavior.<\/p>\n
Participants filled out surveys on eating habits and past experiences with food, including preferences and past food illnesses.\u00a0 They were told that the surveys would be used to test a new method for calculating the probability of childhood experiences, and that their results would determine how likely it was for them to have experienced multiple food-related events.\u00a0 Two weeks after the survey, participants were given a general or personalized suggestion, both, or neither.<\/p>\n
Participants who received a personalized suggestion were told that, according to their results, there was a \u201cvery high probability\u201d\u00a0that they had experienced certain events during childhood.\u00a0 One of these events was sickness caused by spoiled peach yogurt.\u00a0 Those who received generalized suggestions were told that their survey results were inconclusive; meaning the probability that they had experienced any of the food- related experiences was not especially high or low.\u00a0 General suggestion participants were also told that researchers were studying commonly forgotten events that had happened to many people.\u00a0 They were given a false health report from their childhood years describing an outbreak of sickness from e coli<\/i>\u00a0contamination of yogurt, and detailed the symptoms experienced by those affected.<\/p>\n
After the suggestion phase, all individuals participated in a guided imagery activity that asked them to search their memory for details matching the event described and to visualize these details.\u00a0 Later on, attitudes and behavior were measured through surveys and taste tests.\u00a0 Those who had received a personalized suggestion showed an immediate decreased preference for and lowered intention to eat peach yogurt compared to other foods, while those who received a generalized suggestion did not.\u00a0 Personalized suggestion participants also ate less peach flavored yogurt than other flavors, which was not true of the generalized suggestion or control groups.<\/p>\n
Did participants who received a personalized suggestion form an untrue memory about their childhood?\u00a0 The researchers wanted to examine whether this \u201cfalse memory\u201d had formed and if it was responsible for attitude and behavior changes. To do this, they asked participants if they had a memory of the peach yogurt incident happening to them.\u00a0 Of the personalized suggestion group, 19% reported having a memory for the incident, while this was only true for 2% of participants in the generalized suggestion group.\u00a0 This provided support for the theory that personalized suggestion creates false memory more readily than generalized suggestion.\u00a0 Additionally, participants who formed a false memory were more likely to avoid peach yogurt in the taste test, showing the strong influence of memories, true or false, on our behavior.<\/p>\n
What does this study tell us about suggestibility?\u00a0 First of all, shows that for suggestibility to truly influence long-term behavior, the creation of false memory may be necessary. \u00a0The authors pointed out the important role of episodic memory, memory for specific events, in linking suggestion and behavior.\u00a0 Memory of a specific event allows a person to picture future events like it and plan their actions in response to those events.\u00a0 In the case of this study, if a person \u201cremembered\u201d a negative encounter with peach yogurt, he or she was more likely to avoid it in the future.\u00a0 Using our memories to avoid future negative experiences can be very helpful, but it is slightly unsettling to realize that our behavior may be based on false information we have about past experiences.\u00a0 Recognizing the occurrence of suggestibility and the strong impact of episodic memory is important in reducing their influences on our behavior, and greater awareness of these factors on a day-to-day basis could be helpful.<\/p>\n
Reference:<\/p>\n
Scoboria, A., Mazzoni, G., Jarry, J. L., & Bernstein, D. M. (2012). Personalized and not general suggestion produces false autobiographical memories and suggestion-consistent behavior. Acta Psychologica<\/i>, 139<\/i>(1), 225-232. doi:10.1016\/j.actpsy.2011.10.008<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How reliable are your memories?\u00a0 Before I took Cognitive Psych, I never considered this question.\u00a0 In fact, I assumed that most of what I remembered was true, even things from my early childhood.\u00a0 Now that I know about suggestibility, I have begun to second-guess what I know about many of my past experiences.\u00a0 Suggestibility occurs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3314,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80215],"tags":[130388,129785,130400],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":911,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670\/revisions\/911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}