False Memory Perfectionism

People use their memories nearly every second of the day in one way or another. Memory is a vital part of human functioning, to it may be surprising to hear just how frequently one’s memories may not be totally accurate. In this paper, two studies about the production of false memories are examined and connected to key psychological concepts.
The first article is “Perfectionism and False Memories: A Signal Detection Analysis” by Ben-Artzi and Raveh. Their study sought to further understand the effects of personality traits, specifically traits of perfectionism, on the construction of false memories. 97 college students (71 women) at an average age of 26, all native Hebrew speakers, agreed to participate in the study. In the first part
Sensory memory is something one is usually not aware of. It lasts about 1-2 seconds while the brain processes what information should be brought into short-term memory while the rest of the information is discarded. According to the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model, the short-term memory consists of the information that one is consciously thinking about, and does not perform any processing on the information within. Baddeley’s Model of Working Memory, however, suggests that the short-term memory does perform processes on the information it holds, and thus refers to it as the working memory. Then, information is encoded from the short-term (working) memory into the long-term memory. Sometimes, there is loss from the long-term memory, but if the memory has not been lost, it can be recalled through a process of retrieval back into the short-term (working)
Russell’s Circumplex Model describes emotion as being two-dimensional. One dimension of pleasantness (valence) and one dimension of intensity (arousal). James Russell believed that these two scales could account for every emotion. Perhaps these scales are enough to describe emotion, but the experiment in article two proves that there is still a difference between the two similar emotions of anger and fear. Bland, Howe, and Knott proposed that anger and fear both had equally low valence levels and equally high arousal levels. From Russell’s perspective, they are practically the same emotion. However, these two emotions produce two very different adaptational responses. Anger leads one to confrontation, while fear leads to avoidance. A possible explanation is that this difference in responses triggered by the two emotions caused the brain to focus on the words related to the specific emotion being experienced, as if those words could be more useful for