Como lembramos juntos?: emoção e diferenças individuais na conformidade de memória

Abstract

Memory conformity (MC) is a social cognition effect that occurs universally in everyday life, when people assume others memories about an event presented together. Wright, London and Waechter (2010) framework explain its causes as normative and informative. Normative causes refer to the costs and benefits of disagreeing with the group. Informative causes concerns, mainly, about the belief of one's own memory versus that of others. In a typical MC study, pairs of participants are shown an event and then they are tested. One of the participants reports first, and then the second participant responds. Experimental studies have found that what the first participant reports influences the second person reports. Following this research issue, the principal aim in this dissertation was to investigate whether emotional features in photographs and how individual differences in temperament could elicit an impact on MC. This study consists of three sections: The first is a theoretical approach about memory conformity, and the other two sections consist of experimental research. The first empirical 11 section presents a study that used photographs from International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 2008) presented in computers screens to pairs of participants. As a result, we found that negative stimuli impact memory (according to the memory research), but showed no difference between negative, positive or neutral photographs features in the memory conformity phenomenon. The second section used clip arts2 (Nova Development, 2004) and the Afects temperament scale (Lara et al., in press). Results evidenced negative correlations between three temperament factors (anger, inhibition and sensitivity) and memory conformity effect. As conclusion, we consider that in our study emotion valence of photographs did not impact in memory conformity, although does in memory; and that temperament traits influence memory conformity.