Comparison of individuals’ susceptibility to false memory induced by both DRM and misinformation paradigms involving emotional material

False memories induced by the DRM procedure (“Deese, Roediger and McDermott”; Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) or the misinformation procedure (in which a person’s recollection of a witnessed event is altered after exposure to misinformation about this event; Loftus et al., 1978) are due to errors in source monitoring processes (e.g., Johnson et al., 1993) and one might expect the correlation between these false memories quite positive. However, the few laboratory studies comparing the DRM paradigm and the misinformation paradigm show small (Zhu et al., 2013) or no correlation (Ost et al., 2013) between the false memories elicited by these procedures. However, these studies vary in terms of methodological details. For instance, false memories from the misinformation procedure involved emotional content while those from the DRM procedure only included neutral materials. This study investigated the relationship between false memories induced by two different paradigms (a DRM task and a misinformation procedure) both involving an emotional material. Participants (N = 154) completed an emotional variant of the DRM (neutral, positive and negative lists) and the misinformation (neutral, positive and negative images) procedures and their performances on both tasks were compared. Although both paradigms reliably induced false memories in participants, our analyses revealed only a marginally weak positive correlation (r = .147, p = .051) between misinformation and DRM false memories using emotional variants. These results support the idea that DRM and misinformation false memories are underpinned by (at least in part) different mechanisms and that the previous mixed results were not due to the specific content of the DRM or the misinformation task used.