How Do Gender Differences Affect Children's False Memory

Children and Their False Memory

Psychology 101
February 27, 2012

Abstract
Researchers tested sixty, eight and twelve year old, children ability to recall information. Additionally, false memory was tested to study the process of information recall. Deese-Roediger McDermott (DRM) lists were used to study the false memory. Specifically, they test associative strength to words that are actually called. Researchers found that the children used in the study tended to remember the neutral rather than negative emotional DRM lists. Children were able recall more neutral items than negative emotional. Gender did not play a factor in the subject’s false memory
The lists contained 12 items only. Additionally, 10 of the items had the strongest associative strength. The children were tested individually. They were assessed on the series of DRM lists and instructed to try to remember them all. Critical lure occurred when the children were given three neutral word lists (words such as chair, fruit, or sweet were said). The children didn’t quite remember the words but they remembered associated words that were not stated. Then, negative-emotional lists were used (words such as anger, cry, or lie were stated). Once again, children did not remember correct words on the negative-emotional lists, but they did say associated ones. Critical lure also happened in this case. Researchers found that there was no result due to gender of participants so they deleted this variable. It was discovered that age effected how the children remembered. The older children were far better at true recall than the younger ones. They got more words on the DRM lists correctly. Neutral information and negative-emotional information was recalled substantially more by the older group. The study also found that children 's true and false recall rates are higher for neutral information than for negative emotional information. Researchers suggested that the lower rates for recalling negative emotional words cannot be due to differences in familiarity of the items among the children.
This is interesting to know. Children often repress bad memories or information in order to protect themselves emotionally. Maybe, the children repressed the negative-emotional material because it prompted them to think about a traumatic event or something emotionally upsetting. The best part of the article is how much one can learn about certain information and how much it affects the way individuals remember or recall. The worst thing about the article is its vagueness. There were a lot of terms that should have been properly explained and were not. Phrases such as critical lure, negative-emotional, and neutral information were not well defined. The article’s jargon was hard to get through. The charts were incredibly complex to read and hard to understand. I found the results to be unexpected. Children remembered more neutral information than negative emotional. Negative- emotional words would seem to have more of an effect on recall. Therefore one would expect for children to remember more of the negative-emotional information. Conversely, this did not happen. If this was my research project I would design a more in-depth study. I am interested in learning about how negative-emotional information or stimuli can prompt someone to easily forget or repress their memory. I would hypothesize how and why individuals block emotionally alarming stimuli. Is it more than a