Maltreated and non-maltreated children's true and false memories of neutral and emotional word lists in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott task

Gunn Astrid Baugerud*, Mark L. Howe, Svein Magnussen, Annika Melinder

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Maltreated (n=26) and non-maltreated (n=31) 7- to 12-year-old children were tested on the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory task using emotional and neutral word lists. True recall was significantly better for non-maltreated than maltreated children regardless of list valence. The proportion of false recall for neutral lists was comparable regardless of maltreatment status. However, maltreated children showed a significantly higher false recall rate for the emotional lists than non-maltreated children. Together, these results provide new evidence that maltreated children could be more prone to false memory illusions for negatively valenced information than their non-maltreated counterparts.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)102-110
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Experimental Child Psychology
Volume143
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2016

Keywords

  • Maltreated children
  • Non-maltreated children
  • True and false memories
  • Valence
  • Memory

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