Horselenberg, R., Merckelback, H., van Breukelen, G., & Wessel,
differences in the accuracy of autobiographical memory. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 11, 168-176.
The authors wanted to determine if distortions of autobiographical memory occur spontaneously. They also wanted to determine if certain personality traits make this more or less likely to happen.
38 Participants provided brief descriptions of three events each day for two weeks. After 6 months, they were invited to take part in a seemingly unrelated experiment. When they arrived, they were given 40 memory items. 10 were the same, 10 were completely new, 10 were context foils where the context was radically changed by the experimenter, and 10 were evaluation foils where the evaluation was radically changed. They were told that some of the memories were real, some were false, some were evaluation foils, and some were context foils. They were asked to indicate for each item whether it was old, new, an evaluation foil, or a context foil and their confidence in that answer. They then completed some personality inventories including the Creative Experiences Questionnaire, the Dissociative Experiences Scale, the Tellegen Absorption Scale, the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale, and the Beck Depression Inventory.
Results
Context foils elicited more false alarms than evaluation foils, and new foils. Confidence was equivalent for false alarms on both context and evaluation foils. The only personality difference that was correlated with memory distortion was fantasy proneness (CEQ), which was actually not in the predicted direction. Those people that are prone to fantasy made fewer errors on the memory test.
Discussion
Memory performance after 6 months was found to be far from perfect. Fantasy-prone individuals are more likely to have fewer errors on a memory test of autobiographical memory.