Chronic and temporary aggression causes hostile false memories for ambiguous information

Abstract

Chronic and temporarily aggressive people show a phenomenon known as the hostile attribution bias (HAB), in which access to hostile schemas leads them to interpret ambiguously hostile information in a hostile way. Can these people also be induced to remember unambiguously hostile, yet completely false information? To address this question, we investigated the effect of both chronic and temporary aggression on recall for a list containing words that could be interpreted as exemplars of either an aggressive (violence-related) or non-aggressive (kitchen-related) category. Subjects were exposed to five consecutive lists of associated words including the ambiguous list, but half read a list of insult words immediately before presentation of the ambiguous list, while the other half read only emotionally neutral lists. When recalling the ambiguous list, aggressive subjects and subjects who were primed with insult words were more likely to report having seen unpresented aggressive words compared with their low aggressive and not primed counterparts. We discuss our findings in line with Anderson and Bushman's (2002) General Aggression Model (GAM). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.