False memory and the associative network of happiness

http://psp.sagepub.com

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

DOI: 10.1177/0146167208327191 2009; 35; 212 Pers Soc Psychol Bull

Minkyung Koo and Shigehiro Oishi False Memory and the Associative Network of Happiness

http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/2/212 The online version of this article can be found at:

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

can be found at:Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin Additional services and information for

http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:

http://psp.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/35/2/212 Citations

at UNIV OF VIRGINIA on February 15, 2009 http://psp.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://www.spsp.org/

http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://psp.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/35/2/212


212

False Memory and the AssociativeNetwork of Happiness

Minkyung KooShigehiro OishiUniversity of Virginia

2001) to their personality traits (e.g., Tellegenet al., 1988; for a review see Diener & Lucas, 1999;Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999).As research in this area burgeons, there have also

been several attempts to reveal the cognitive processesof happy people and unhappy people and to investigatehow processes such as encoding and retrieval inmemory affect judgments of happiness. For example,happy people tend to remember a greater number ofpositive events and emotions than negative ones (Diener& Seligman, 2002). Happy people recall a greaternumber of positive events than negative events becausethey actually experience a greater number of positiveevents than negative events in daily life, and they inter-pret the same life events in a more positive way than dounhappy people (Seidlitz & Diener, 1993). In additionto perceiving naturally occurring life events in a morepositive way, happy people perceive the same interac-tion partner more favorably than do unhappy people(Lyubomirsky & Tucker, 1998). Happy people are alsomore likely to pay attention to positive events than tonegative events and exhibit more intense and enduringreactions to positive life events relative to unhappypeople (Seidlitz, Wyer, & Diener, 1997). Unhappypeople are more sensitive to and give more weight tonegative social comparison information (e.g., low rank-ing) in judging themselves (Lyubomirsky, Tucker, &Kasri, 2001).

Authors’ Note: We thank Elizabeth Salmon and Ilyas Saloom for col-lecting data and Justin Storbeck, Chad Dodson, and Janet Palmer forproviding the experimental materials for Study 1. We also thank JesseGraham, Jason Kisling, Janetta Lun, and Dana Roth for their helpfulcomments on this article. Correspondence can be sent to MinkyungKoo, Psychology Department, University of Virginia, P.O. Box400400, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400; e-mail: [email protected].

PSPB, Vol. 35 No. 2, February 2009 212-220DOI: 10.1177/0146167208327191© 2009 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

This research examines the relationship between indi-viduals’ levels of life satisfaction and their associativenetworks of happiness. Study 1 measured EuropeanAmericans’ degree of false memory of happiness usingthe Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Scores onthe Satisfaction With Life Scale predicted the likelihoodof false memory of happiness but not of other lurewords such as sleep. In Study 2, European Americanparticipants completed an association-judgment task inwhich they judged the extent to which happiness andeach of 15 positive emotion terms were associated witheach other. Consistent with Study 1’s findings, chroni-cally satisfied individuals exhibited stronger associa-tions between happiness and other positive emotionterms than did unsatisfied individuals. However,Koreans and Asian Americans did not exhibit such apattern regarding their chronic level of life satisfaction(Study 3). In combination, results suggest that there areimportant individual and cultural differences in the cog-nitive structure and associative network of happiness.

Keywords: happiness; subjective well-being; life satisfaction;memory; cognition; culture

Research in the field of subjective well-being hasflourished during the past few decades. Researchers

have established the construct validity of subjective well-being (e.g., Diener, 1994; Lucas, Diener, & Suh, 1996),demonstrated important behavioral consequences of hap-piness (e.g., Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005; Oishi,Diener, & Lucas, 2007), and investigated concrete waysto improve happiness (e.g., Emmons & McCullough,2003; Fleeson, Malanos, & Achille, 2002; Gable,Gonzaga, & Strachman, 2006). The characteristics ofhappy people have also been successfully identified, rang-ing from their personal goals (Elliot, Sheldon, & Church,1997; Elliot & Sheldon, 1998; Gable, 2005; Tamir &Diener, in press) and implicit motives (Woike & Polo,



Individuals’ cognitive processing has been examinedaccording to not only their chronic level of happinessbut also their momentary state of happiness. Forexample, people in a happy mood are more likely torecall information that is congruent with their mood(e.g., Bower, Gilligan, & Monteiro, 1981). That is,people selectively pay attention to and encode informa-tion depending on their mood, and this tendency is notlimited to self-relevant information; rather, it can begeneralized to other domains (Mayer, Gaschke,Braverman, & Evans, 1992). In addition to this mood-congruency effect, a great number of studies reveal thatpeople in a happy mood versus those in a sad moodengage in distinctive cognitive processes. Happy peopleengage in relatively global, heuristic, and relationalthinking, whereas sad people engage in relatively local,systematic, and item-specific processing (e.g., Bless,Bohner, Schwarz, & Strack, 1990; Gasper & Clore,2002; Isen & Daubman, 1984).Although previous research has sought to understand

the cognitive correlates of chronically and temporarilyhappy people and unhappy people, only a fewresearchers have examined either happiness itself as acognitive structure or how people think about happi-ness and what people associate with it (for notableexceptions, see Robinson & Kirkeby, 2005; Robinson& von Hippel, 2006; Uchida & Kitayama, 2005). Theprimary focus of the research reported here is this cog-nitive associative network of happiness with regard torelevant positive emotions and how the strength of theassociative network differs according to individuals’chronic level of happiness, measured by the SatisfactionWith Life Scale (SWLS; Diener, Emmons, Larsen, &Griffin, 1985). We hypothesized that the associationbetween happiness and other positive emotions isstronger among happy people than among less happypeople. We tested our hypothesis using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Roediger &McDermott, 1995). The DRM paradigm tests thesemantic activation and association strength of a coreconcept in connection with related concepts. In this par-adigm, participants are presented with a series of wordlists. The words in each list are associated with a singlenonpresented critical lure word. For example, the criti-cal lure word window can be associated with suchwords as door, glass, screen, and house. After the pre-sentation of each list, participants perform a free recalltest and/or a recognition test regarding nonstudied lurewords, other nonstudied words, and studied words.False memories involve identification of nonstudied lurewords or other nonstudied words in the memory test.The likelihood of generating false memories in the freerecall task is correlated with the strength of associationbetween the words in the list and their critical lure.

On the basis of this strength of association determin-ing the probability of false recall, we predicted that,when presented with relevant positive emotion words inthe DRM paradigm, happy people (i.e., individuals whoscore high on the SWLS) would be more vulnerablethan unhappy people would be to false recall of the crit-ical lure happiness because they would have strongerassociations between happiness and those positive emo-tion words.Several lines of research on life satisfaction and cog-

nitive belief systems provide indirect support for ourhypothesis. First, using a reaction time paradigm,Robinson and Kirkeby (2005) studied the judgmentsthat people made regarding the degree to which theywould feel a positive emotion. They found that when apositive emotion preceded these judgments happypeople rendered a judgment more quickly than did lesshappy people. The faster judgment coming on the heelsof the second positive emotion suggests that the firstemotion’s priming effect among happy people isstronger than among less happy people. This, in turn,indicates that there is a stronger interconnectionbetween two positive emotions among happy peoplethan among less happy people. Robinson and vonHippel (2006) further extended this priming effectamong happy people to the evaluation, categorization,and perception of affective stimuli that are not limitedto self-relevant traits. This suggests that happy peopleform a tighter interconnection of positive concepts ingeneral than do less happy people.Building on these findings by Robinson and col-

leagues, this research examines the strength of connec-tivity between happiness and other positive emotionwords as well as tested the idea that happiness is a hubof the cognitive structure among chronically happypeople. Robinson and Clore’s (2002) model of emo-tional self-report suggests that, compared to those lowin self-reported life satisfaction, individuals high in self-reported life satisfaction not only experience a greaternumber of positive emotions and positive life events butare also more likely to believe that they experiencemany positive events. Therefore, we postulate that indi-viduals who regard themselves as happy would associ-ate happiness with other positive emotion words morestrongly than would individuals who do not regardthemselves as happy and that, as a result, happy peopleshould be more vulnerable to false memory of happinessthan less happy people.

THIS RESEARCH

In Study 1, we used the DRM paradigm to testwhether chronically happy people show a greater rate of

Koo, Oishi / FALSE MEMORY OF HAPPINESS 213



false memory of happiness than do unhappy people. InStudy 2, we directly assessed the degree to which indi-viduals associate happiness with other positive emo-tions and tested whether chronically happy individualswould be more likely to perceive happiness as beingclosely connected to other positive emotions in generalthan would unhappy people. Finally, in Study 3, weexamined cultural differences that surfaced in the asso-ciation between happiness and other positive emotions.Past research shows that the meanings of happiness varyacross cultures (e.g., Diener & Suh, 2000; Kitayama &Markus, 2000) and that people of different culturesmake judgments about their well-being in highly differ-ent ways (Oishi, 2002; Suh, Diener, Oishi, & Triandis,1998). Specifically, European Americans’ concept ofhappiness corresponds to highly positive words,whereas the Japanese concept of happiness correspondsto negative words as well as positive ones (Uchida &Kitayama, 2005; Uchida, Norasakkunkit, & Kitayama,2004). This difference implies that East Asians’ associa-tion between happiness and other positive emotions isweaker than that of European Americans, and EastAsians’ association between happiness and negativeemotions is stronger than that of European Americans.Moreover, if the concept of happiness includes negativeaspects in East Asian cultures, higher life satisfactionwould not necessarily be linked to a greater associationbetween happiness and other positive emotions. Thus,in Study 3, we predicted that the chronic levels of hap-piness would be correlated with the association judg-ments of happiness among European Americans but notamong East Asians. Because we compared EuropeanAmericans with East Asians in Study 3, we includedonly European American participants in the first twostudies to make the results from the first two studiesmore comparable to those from Study 3.

STUDY 1: FALSE MEMORY OF HAPPINESS

In Study 1, we examined whether individuals withhigher levels of life satisfaction would exhibit a greaterdegree of false memory of happiness than would indi-viduals with lower levels life satisfaction.

Method

Participants. Participants were 89 (60 male, 29female) students who identified themselves as EuropeanAmerican at the University of Virginia. The participantsreceived a course credit in return for their participation.The mean age of the participants was 19.23.

Procedure. Participants performed a memory task ona computer screen, which was adapted from the DRM

paradigm (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Thememory task consisted of a study phase and a recallphase. In the study phase, participants were presentedwith a total of 20 lists on a computer screen. Each listhad 15 words that were semantically related to a non-presented critical lure word, and each word was pre-sented for 250 ms with a 32 ms interstimulus interval.All words in each of the 20 lists were presented in thesame order to all participants. Among the 20 criticallure words, 3 were positive words (happiness, nice,love), 3 were negative words (anger, sad, fear), and 14were neutral words (chair, sleep, cup, mountain, slow,window, river, soft, needle, bread, sweet, pen, smell,car). After the presentation of each list accompanied bya warning signal to begin, participants were asked torecall the words they saw and to record these words ina recall booklet. They were given 45 seconds for recall,after which they were guided to the next list accompa-nied by another warning signal to begin recall.

Word lists. The word lists in our study have beenadapted from previous research that used the DRM par-adigm (McDermott & Watson, 2001; Palmer &Dodson, 2008; Roediger, Watson, McDermott, &Gallo, 2001).1 Past research shows that false recall ratesare influenced by the backward associative strength ofthe lists (Roediger et al., 2001). Backward associativestrength indicates the probability that participants, afterseeing a particular study word, would mention a criticallure word in a free association test (McEvoy, Nelson, &Komatsu, 1999). That is, the greater a list’s mean asso-ciative strength, the more likely people will be to exhibitfalse memories by recalling a critical lure word in a typ-ical DRM paradigm. In our study, the associativestrength of the word lists was not critical because ourmain interest was not to compare overall false recallrates across different lists but to compare false memo-ries according to individuals’ happiness. Nonetheless, toavoid potential confounding from differences in theassociative strength of the lists, we selected lists thatwere comparable in their backward associativestrength; the mean backward associative strength foreach of the positive, negative, and neutral word listsranged from .203 to .265.

Satisfaction with life. After completion of thememory task, we measured participants’ life satisfactionby using the SWLS (Diener et al., 1985). The SWLS isdesigned to measure chronic levels rather than tempo-rary levels of happiness. Participants reported thedegree to which they agreed with each of five statements(e.g., “In most ways, my life is close to my ideal”) on a7-point scale (1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree;α = .72).

214 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN



Other individual difference measures. Following theSWLS, we measured participants’ present mood.Participants rated the extent to which they were experi-encing each of seven feelings (relaxed, anxious, proud,nervous, friendly, enthusiastic, sad) at that moment on a5-point scale (1 = not at all; 5 = extremely). Finally, wemeasured participants’ self-esteem and personality byusing the Rosenberg self-esteem scale (α = .85;Rosenberg, 1965) and the 25-item Big Five scale (open-ness to experiences, α = .70; conscientiousness, α = .70;extraversion, α = .78; agreeableness, α = .81; neuroti-cism, α = .86; Brody & Ehrlichman, 1998), respectively.

Results and Discussion

A higher rate of false recall of critical lures indicatesa tighter semantic knowledge network between the crit-ical lure and other relevant concepts (Deese, 1959). Wetested whether an individual’s chronic level of life sat-isfaction was associated with the likelihood of falserecall of happiness, using a binary logistic regressionanalysis, in which the false recall of happiness wascoded as 1 and the accurate nonrecall was coded as 0.As predicted, scores on the SWLS predicted the likeli-hood of false memory of happiness, b = 0.86 (SE =0.44), wald = 3.76, p = .05. That is, individuals whowere satisfied with their lives were more likely tofalsely recall happiness as one of the studied wordsthan were individuals who were unsatisfied with theirlives. As expected, the chronic level of life satisfactionwas associated only with the false memory of happi-ness and not with false memories of other lure words(e.g., sleep, chair, mountain, pen; see Table 1). In addi-tion, individuals’ life satisfaction was not associatedwith the overall rate of false recall, β = .03, t = 0.23,p = .82, or the overall veridical recall rate, β = –.10,t = –0.95, p = .35. Not surprisingly, then, scores onthe SWLS predicted false memory of happiness evenwhen we controlled for overall false memory rates, b =1.16 (SE = 0.57), wald = 4.12, p = .04, for false mem-ories of other positive words (e.g., nice, love), b = 0.94(SE = 0.47), wald = 3.93, p = .05, for false memoriesof negative words (e.g., anger, fear), b = 0.87 (SE =0.45), wald = 3.81, p = .05, and for false memories ofneutral words (e.g., sleep, cup), b = 1.11 (SE = 0.55),wald = 4.06, p = .04.Next, we examined whether current mood rather

than chronic level of life satisfaction per se predictedfalse memory of happiness. Multiple regression analysesshowed that individual levels of life satisfaction pre-dicted false memory of happiness when we controlledfor current positive mood, b = 0.85 (SE = 0.46), wald =3.41, p = .06, and negative mood, b = 0.84 (SE =0.45), wald = 3.54, p = .06. However, participants’current mood did not predict either overall probability

of false recall, β = .07, t = 0.68, p = .50, or false recallin any of the word lists, |b|s < .50, Walds < 2.36,ps > .13.Finally, we tested whether life satisfaction predicted

false memory of happiness when we controlled for otherindividual traits. We found that scores of life satisfactionpredicted false memory of happiness when we controlledfor self-esteem, b = 1.19 (SE = 0.55), wald = 4.77, p =.03, openness to experiences, b = 0.87 (SE = 0.45),Wald = 3.69, p = .06, conscientiousness, b = .91 (SE =0.46),Wald = 3.87, p = .05, extraversion, b = 0.79 (SE= 0.45), Wald = 3.09, p = .08, agreeableness, b = 0.81(SE = 0.44), Wald = 3.32, p = .07, and neuroticism,b = 0.93 (SE = 0.47),Wald = 3.88, p = .05.Using a different experimental paradigm, Study 1

replicated previous research (Robinson & Kirkeby,2005; Robinson & von Hippel, 2006) and showed thathappy people form a stronger interconnection betweenpositive concepts than unhappy people do. To theextent that scores on the SWLS are associated with dailyemotional experiences (Diener & Lucas, 2000), ourresults indicate that an individual’s concepts of happi-ness are shaped in part by personal emotional experi-ences. Chronically happy people may not only believethat they are happy people (Robinson & Clore, 2002)but also perceive a closer connection between happinessand other positive emotions.In sum, the results of Study 1 provide strong support

for our prediction that individuals high in life satisfactionassociate happiness with other positive emotions morestrongly than do individuals low in life satisfaction.


TABLE 1: Predictability of scores of SWLS in false recall of criticallure words

Critical lure word Coefficient (SE) P-value

Chair –.02 (0.24) .94Sleep –.06 (0.24) .79Cup –.06 (0.25) .80Happy .86 (0.44) .05Mountain .08 (0.26) .77Slow .26 (0.27) .34Window –.07 (0.25) .77Anger .14 (0.26) .58River .09 (0.35) .79Nice .99 (1.43) .49Soft –.34 (0.24) .16Needle .20 (0.25) .41Love –.04 (0.32) .90Bread .47 (0.36) .19Sweet .04 (0.25) .87Pen –.02 (0.28) .95Sad .01 (0.37) .98Smell –.04 (0.27) .88Car .29 (0.35) .41Fear –.32 (0.26) .21



STUDY 2

In Study 2, to test our hypothesis regarding the asso-ciative network of happiness more directly, we had par-ticipants complete an association judgment task inwhich they explicitly judged the extent to which happi-ness and each of 15 other positive emotion words wereassociated with each other.

Method

Participants. Eighty-seven (39 male, 48 female) self-identified European American students from theUniversity of Virginia participated in this study.Participants received a course credit in return for their par-ticipation. The mean age of the participants was 18.81.

Procedure. Participants were provided with a total of42 pairs of words. Among the 42 pairs, 15 were pairs ofthe word happy and each of 15 other positive emotionwords (e.g., happy–pleased, happy–joyful), 15 werepairs of the word mountain and each of 15 othermountain-related words (e.g., mountain–hill, mountain–top), and the remaining 12 were pairs of other nonemo-tional neutral words (e.g., curtain–house, needle–thread,tea–mug). We adopted the word pairs from the lists thatwe used in Study 1. That is, the positive emotion wordsand the mountain-related words that were presented inpairs with the words happy and mountain, respectively,were all present as studied words in the recall task ofStudy 1.Participants were asked to rate—using a 7-point

scale (1 = not at all; 7 = very strongly)—the strength ofthe association between two given words. Then, theyrated their life satisfaction (α = .84), current mood(α = .68), self-esteem (α = .91), and Big Five personal-ity traits (openness to experiences, α = .70; conscien-tiousness, α = .64; extraversion, α = .76; agreeableness,α = .82; neuroticism, α = .89) in an identical way as inStudy 1.


Consistent with the findings of Study 1, individuals’life satisfaction scores predicted the strength of associa-tion between happiness and other positive emotionwords, β = .35, t = 3.41, p < .01. Individuals with rel-atively high life satisfaction were more likely to identifya strong association between happiness and positiveemotion words (e.g., joyful, pleased) than were individ-uals with relatively low life satisfaction.An individual’s level of life satisfaction predicted asso-

ciation judgments for happiness when we controlled forcurrent positive mood, β = .37, t = 3.11, p < .01, andnegative mood, β = .40, t = 3.63, p < .01, as well as

other individual traits such as self-esteem, β = .36, t =2.45, p = .02, openness, β = .38, t = 3.60, p < .01, con-scientiousness, β = .35, t = 3.36, p < .01, extraversion,β = .31, t = 2.93, p < .01, agreeableness, β = .35, t =3.38, p < .01, and neuroticism, β = .41, t = 3.66, p < .01.Finally, consistent with Study 1, there was no differ-

ence in the ratings for mountain, β = .11, t = 1.04, p =.30, or for other neutral words, β = .02, t = 0.16, p =.87, according to participants’ level of life satisfaction(see Figure 1). Also, participants’ current mood wasunrelated to the association judgments for happiness,β = .14, t = 1.30, p = 20, for mountain, β = –.07, t =–0.63, p = .53, or for other neutral words, β = –.12,t = –1.13, p = .26.In sum, Study 2 conceptually replicated the findings

of Study 1, showing that individuals’ life satisfactionpredicted their association judgment between happinessand other positive emotion words. Moreover, this effectwas not observed for momentary states of happiness;rather, it was unique to an individual’s chronic level ofhappiness.

STUDY 3

There were two main purposes of Study 3. First, inthe previous two studies, we measured participants’ lifesatisfaction following their completion of the maintasks. Although judgments of life satisfaction are rela-tively stable over time (e.g., Pavot & Diener, 1993;Schimmack & Oishi, 2005), they can be affected by sit-uational factors (e.g., Schwarz & Strack, 1999).Therefore, in Study 3, we obtained participants’ life sat-isfaction scores roughly one month before the mainstudy and examined the relationship between their lifesatisfaction and association judgments.Second, in the previous two studies, we tested the

association between happiness and other positive emo-tion words among European Americans. As discussed


2

3

4

5

6

happiness mountain other

Ass

ocia

tion

Rat

ings

SWLS Low

SWLS High

Figure 1 Association judgment according to the scores of theSatisfaction With Life Scale.



above, it is highly probable that our findings are uniqueto our European American sample considering the pre-vious research that showed cultural differences in themeaning of happiness (e.g., Uchida & Kitayama, 2005).In Study 3, we investigated possible cultural differencesamong European Americans, Asian Americans, andKoreans in the association between happiness and otherpositive emotion words as a function of individuals’ lifesatisfaction. We included Asian Americans to rule outpossible confounding resulting from translating experi-mental materials from English into a different language(i.e., Korean). In addition, we aimed to investigate cul-tural variation in the strength of this association accord-ing to the degree of enculturation, as past studies haveshowed that Asian Americans often fell betweenEuropean Americans and East Asians in various psy-chological processes (cf. Miyamoto, Kitayama, &Talhelm, 2006).

Method

Participants. Forty-five (13 male, 32 female) self-identified European American students and 34 (10male, 24 female) self-identified Asian Americanstudents were recruited from the University of Virginia,and 63 (32 male, 31 female) Korean students wererecruited from Seoul National University in Korea.Participants received a course credit for their participa-tion. The mean age of the participants was 19.24(European American), 18.82 (Asian American), and21.95 (Korean).2

Procedure. European American and Asian Americanparticipants’ life satisfaction scores were measured in apretest that was taken at the beginning of the semester(α = .84). Korean participants completed the life satis-faction scale along with other scales in a separate study(α = .76). Asian American participants were limited toindividuals of East Asian ethnicity (i.e., Chinese,Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese). Participants were pro-vided with a total of 42 pairs of words, which had thesame composition as in Study 2. Using a 7-point scale(1 = not at all; 7 = very strongly), participants ratedhow strongly the two words in each pair were associatedwith each other.


Consistent with past research on culture and well-being (e.g., Oishi, Diener, Choi, Kim-Prieto, & Choi,2007), participants’ overall life satisfaction levels dif-fered across cultures. Specifically, European Americans(M = 25.20) scored the highest, Koreans (M = 20.65)scored the lowest, and Asian Americans (M = 24.20) fellbetween the two groups, F(2, 140) = 11.14, p < .01.

Our primary interest in this study was to examinewhether individuals’ life satisfaction would predict thestrength of association between happiness and other pos-itive emotion words in cultures other than EuropeanAmerican. As in Study 2, regression analyses showed thatamong European Americans scores of life satisfactionpredicted the association judgment for happiness, β =.28, t = 1.91, p = .06. However, this relationship wasnot found among Asian Americans, β = –.17, t = –0.95,p = .35, or Koreans, β = –.04, t = –0.34, p = .73. Scoresof life satisfaction did not predict the association judg-ment in any of the ethnicity groups for mountain-relatedwords, |β|s < .12, |t|s < 0.70, ps > .49, or other non-emotion neutral words, |β|s < .18, |t|s < 0.10, ps > .32.The findings from Study 3, then, illustrated that

unlike European American participants, Asian Americanand Korean participants chronically high in life satisfac-tion did not associate happiness with other positive emo-tion words more strongly than did those who were lesssatisfied. This finding implies that Asian Americans andKoreans perceive themselves as satisfied with their lifenot necessarily because they experience a great numberof positive emotions. Indeed, Suh et al. (1998) showedthat life satisfaction was more strongly associated withemotional experiences among members of individualisticcultures than among members of collectivistic cultures.In short, these findings together suggest that the conceptof happiness is more heterogeneous, complex, and dis-tinct from other positive emotions in a culture in whichrelational harmony and interpersonal obligations areemphasized than it is in a culture where relational con-cerns are secondary to personal ones (e.g., an individ-ual’s accomplishment; Uchida et al., 2004).

GENERAL DISCUSSION

In three studies, we found evidence that amongEuropean American participants the strength of one’sassociative network of happiness depends largely onone’s chronic level of life satisfaction. People relativelyhigh in life satisfaction have established stronger associ-ations between happiness and other positive emotionwords than have those relatively low in life satisfaction.Furthermore, this association was unique for happinessand absent for other emotion words or neutral words.Building on Robinson and Kirkeby (2005), we identi-fied important individual differences in the associativestrength between happiness and other positive emotionwords—a strength that manifests itself in false memoryof happiness. Moreover, consistent with past researchthat revealed divergent factors predicting happiness indifferent cultures (e.g., Suh et al., 1998), this relation-ship between life satisfaction and strength of association




was not found among Korean or Asian Americanparticipants.There are several important implications of these

findings for well-being research and for affect-as-information research. First, previous research has foundthat a transitory happy mood causes individuals to payattention to the big picture, whereas a transitory sadmood causes them to pay attention to details (e.g.,Gasper & Clore, 2002). Using the same DRM paradigmused in our study, Storbeck and Clore (2005) demon-strated that a temporary happy mood could increase thelikelihood of false memories regarding various wordcategories. Whereas they found that a transitory happymood was associated with a greater degree of falsememories in general, we found that high chronic levelsof happiness were associated with false memories onlyof happiness, not of other words. What causes these dis-crepancies between transitory and chronic happiness?As Storbeck and Clore argued, a happy mood serves asa signal that everything is fine and that, consequently,there is no need to pay close attention to details (i.e., ago signal). Conversely, a sad mood serves as a signalthat we should be careful (i.e., a stop signal). To theextent that the signal associated with a mood is general,the effect of a temporary mood in cognitive processingshould be general. In contrast, a chronic level of happi-ness does not necessarily signal “go” at all times, ashappy individuals recognize risks in their lives as well asless happy individuals do (for a relevant discussion, seeTaylor & Gollwitzer, 1995). As discussed by Robinsonand Clore (2002), a chronic level of happiness is associ-ated with self-concept and belief regarding happiness.Individuals high in chronic levels of happiness mightorganize various positive experiences using happiness asan overarching concept and blur fine differences amongpositive experiences. However, happy people do notnecessarily blur fine differences among the conceptsassociated with a bedroom, a window, or a mountain.Therefore, we believe that the cognitive discrepanciesbetween transitory happiness and chronic levels of hap-piness are because of the different mechanisms withwhich each of them is associated. To the extent that achronic level of happiness is associated with one’s self-concept and beliefs about happiness, false memories areand should be specific to the concept of happiness. Insum, these findings clarify the differential effects of atransitory happy mood and a chronic level of happiness.Second, whereas the induced mood had a significant

effect on false memories in the previous research(Storbeck & Clore, 2005), our measurements of currentmood were not associated with false memories of anyconcept. Although both are transitory moods, one isexperimentally induced while the other is naturallyoccurring. Induced moods are different from naturally

occurring moods in the sense that participants’ moodsare altered from a baseline. Thus, the go or stop signalthat is associated with a transitory mood might be dri-ven mainly by the change in mood. That is, a changefrom a neutral mood to a happy state may signal thateverything is fine. Likewise, a change from a neutralmood to a sad state may signal that something is wrong.At this point, this is still speculative, and future researchshould investigate the differences between inducedmoods and naturally occurring moods to gain a moreprecise understanding of their effects at the time ofexperiment.It is not yet clear what exactly mediates this difference

in the strength of association according to one’s level oflife satisfaction among European Americans. As dis-cussed at the outset, it is plausible that participants’ lifesatisfaction serves as a belief system that guides peoplewith high satisfaction to believe that they experience pos-itive emotions more frequently and intensely than it doesthose with low life satisfaction (Robinson&Clore, 2002).Moreover, compared to people with low life satisfaction,those with high life satisfaction indeed tend to experiencemore positive life events and positive emotions (Seidlitzet al., 1997). Insofar as the frequency of an event influ-ences its associations in memory, positive life events andemotions will be more salient in memory for those withhigh life satisfaction than those with low satisfaction(Smith, 1998). Therefore, individuals’ life satisfaction canbe positively correlated with their perception of the fre-quency and the intensity of the positive emotions theyexperience, and thus, individuals with high life satisfac-tion would associate the word happiness with other pos-itive emotion words more frequently and more closelythan would individuals with low life satisfaction. Indeed,our findings support this idea: The SWLS scores but notthe measures of current affect predicted the associativestrength for happiness. The SWLS measures the stablecognitive component of happiness as opposed to tempo-rary mood states at the time of judgment (Schimmack &Oishi, 2005). Our findings, then, suggest that the conceptof happiness is relatively stable and not vulnerable totransitory mood states.However, for East Asian participants, there was no

relationship between life satisfaction and associationjudgment. A plausible explanation of this finding restson previous findings that East Asians’ criteria formaking life satisfaction judgments do not depend onwhether they experience more pleasant emotions thanunpleasant emotions (Suh et al., 1998) and that EastAsians’ concept of happiness includes negative as wellas positive concepts (Uchida & Kitayama, 2005).Another explanation of our findings concerns EastAsians’ dialectical perception that pleasant and unpleas-ant emotions can be positively correlated to each other





(Bagozzi, Wong, & Yi, 1999; Schimmack, Oishi, &Diener, 2002).

CONCLUSION

This research has demonstrated that (a) amongEuropean Americans, chronically happy individuals bothexhibit false memory of happinessmore frequently than dounhappy individuals and do not exhibit false memories ofother concepts more frequently than do unhappy individu-als; (b) people with chronically high levels of satisfactionassociate happinesswith other positive emotion words to agreater extent than do less chronically satisfied people, andthis association is unique among European Americans; and(c) naturally occurring happy moods are associated neitherwith false memory of happiness nor with association judg-ments of happiness and other positive emotion words.Although there are some principles applicable to both tran-sitory and chronic happiness (for a review, see Lyubomirskyet al., 2005), our research has illuminated a divergent pat-tern of results for these two types of happiness in regard tofalse memories and association judgments. It is an impor-tant future agenda to identify convergent and divergentpatterns of a transitory happy mood and a chronic level ofhappiness as well as to examine why diverse patternsemerge across different cultures.

NOTES

1. Some of the lists we used were not exactly the same as the onesfrom past research. For example, Roediger, Watson, McDermott, andGallo (2001) used 15 words and Palmer and Dodson (2008) used 10words in each list. We adopted most of our nonemotion word listsfrom Roediger et al. and selected 15 emotional words from the initialfree-association data that Palmer and Dodson collected.2. Although the mean age of Korean participants was greater than

the mean age of other groups, all findings remained constant after wecontrolled for age.

REFERENCES

Bagozzi, R. P., Wong, N., & Yi, Y. (1999). The role of culture andgender in the relationship between positive and negative affect.Cognition and Emotion, 13, 641-672.

Bless, H., Bohner, G., Schwarz, N., & Strack, F. (1990). Mood andpersuasion: A cognitive response analysis. Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin, 16, 331-345.

Bower, G. H., Gilligan, S. G., & Monteiro, K. P. (1981). Selectivelearning caused by affective states. Journal of ExperimentalPsychology: General, 110, 451-473.

Brody, N., & Ehrlichman, H. (1998). Personality psychology: Thescience of individuality. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Deese, J. (1959). On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbalintrusions in immediate recall. Journal of ExperimentalPsychology, 58, 17-22.

Diener, E. (1994). Assessing subjective well-being: Progress andopportunities. Social Indicators Research, 31, 103-157.

Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). TheSatisfaction With Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment,49, 71-75.

Diener, E., & Lucas, R. (2000). Subjective emotional well-being. InM. Lewis & J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of emotions(2nd ed., pp. 325-337). New York: Guilford.

Diener, E., & Lucas, R. E. (1999). Personality and subjective well-being. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (pp. 213-229).New York: Russell Sage.

Diener, E., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Very happy people.Psychological Science, 13, 80-83.

Diener, E., & Suh, E. M. (Eds.). (2000). Culture and subjective well-being. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Diener, E., Suh, M., Lucas, E., & Smith, H. (1999). Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125,276-302.

Elliot, A. J., & Sheldon, K. M. (1998). Avoidance personal goals andthe personality-illness relationship. Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology, 75, 1282-1299.

Elliot, A. J., Sheldon, K. M., & Church, M. A. (1997). Avoidance per-sonal goals and subjective well-being. Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin, 23, 915-927.

Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessingsversus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude andsubjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 84, 377-389.

Fleeson, W., Malanos, A., & Achille, N. (2002). An intra-individualprocess approach to the relationship between extraversion andpositive affect: Is acting extraverted as “good” as beingextraverted? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83,1409-1422.

Gable, S. L. (2005). Approach and avoidance social motives andgoals. Journal of Personality, 74, 175-222.

Gable, S. L., Gonzaga, G. C., & Strachman, A. (2006). Will you bethere for me when things go right? Supportive responses to posi-tive event disclosures. Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 91, 904-917.

Gasper, K., & Clore, G. L. (2002). Attending to the big picture: Moodand global vs. local processing of visual information.Psychological Science, 13, 34-40.

Isen, A. M., & Daubman, K. A. (1984). The influence of affect on cat-egorization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47,1206-1217.

Kitayama, S., &Markus, H. R. (2000). The pursuit of happiness and therealization of sympathy: Cultural patterns of self, social relations,and well-being. In E. Diener and E. M. Suh (Eds.), Culture and sub-jective well-being (pp. 113-161). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lucas, R. E., Diener, E., & Suh, E. (1996). Discriminant validity ofwell-being measures. Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 71, 616-628.

Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of fre-quent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success?Psychological Bulletin, 131, 803-855.

Lyubomirsky, S., & Tucker, K. L. (1998). Implications of individualdifferences in subjective happiness for perceiving, interpreting, andthinking about life events.Motivation and Emotion, 22, 155-186.

Lyubomirsky, S., Tucker, K. L., & Kasri, F. (2001). Responses to hedo-nically conflicting social comparisons: Comparing happyand unhappy people. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31,511-535.

Mayer, J. D., Gaschke, Y. N., Braverman, D. L., & Evans T. W.(1992). Mood congruent judgment is a general effect. Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology, 63, 119-132.

McDermott, K. B., & Watson, J. M. (2001). The rise and fall of falserecall: The impact of presentation duration. Journal of Memoryand Language, 45, 160-176.

McEvoy, C. L., Nelson, D. L., & Komatsu, T. (1999). What is the con-nection between true and false memories? The differential roles ofinteritem associations in recall and recognition. Journal ofExperimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 25,1177-1194.




Miyamoto, Y., Kitayama, S., & Talhelm, T. (2006, January). A meta-analytic review of cultural differences in cognitive processes.Poster presented at the sixth conference of the Society forPersonality and Social Psychology, Palm Springs, CA.

Oishi, S. (2002). Experiencing and remembering of well-being: Across-cultural analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,28, 1398-1406.

Oishi, S., Diener, E., Choi, D. W., Kim-Prieto, C., & Choi, I. (2007).The dynamics of daily events and well-being across cultures: Whenless is more. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93,685-698.

Oishi, S., Diener, E., & Lucas, R. E. (2007). The optimum level ofwell-being: Can people be too happy? Perspectives onPsychological Science, 2, 346-360.

Palmer, J. E., & Dodson, C. S. (2008). Investigating the mechanismsfuelling reduced false recall of emotional material. Cognition andEmotion, 22, 1-22.

Pavot, W., & Diener, E. (1993). The affective and cognitive context ofself-reported measures of subjective well-being. Social IndicatorsResearch, 28, 1-20.

Robinson, M. D., & Clore, G. L. (2002). Beliefs, situations, and theirinteractions: Towards a model of emotion reporting. PsychologicalBulletin, 128, 934-960.

Robinson, M. D., & Kirkeby, B. S. (2005). Happiness as a belief sys-tem: Individual differences and priming in emotion judgments.Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1134-1144.

Robinson, M. D., & von Hippel, W. (2006). Rose-colored primingeffects: Life satisfaction and affective priming. Journal of PositivePsychology, 1, 187-197.

Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memo-ries: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal ofPersonality Assessment, 74, 384-399.

Roediger, H. L., Watson, J. M., McDermott, K. B., & Gallo, D. A.(2001). Factors that determine false recall: A multiple regressionanalysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 385-407.

Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schimmack, U., & Oishi, S. (2005). Chronically accessible versus tem-porarily accessible sources of life satisfaction judgments. Journalof Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 395-406.

Schimmack, U., Oishi, S., & Diener, E. (2002). Cultural influences onthe relation between pleasant emotions and unpleasant emotions:Asian dialectic philosophies or individualism-collectivism?Cognition and Emotion, 16, 705-719.

Schwarz, N., & Strack, F. (1999). Reports of subjective well-being:Judgmental processes and their methodological implications. InD. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-being: Thefoundations of hedonic psychology (pp. 61-84). New York:Russell Sage.

Seidlitz, L., & Diener, E. (1993). Memory for positive versus negativelife events: Theories for the differences between happy andunhappy persons. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,64, 654-664.

Seidlitz, L., Wyer, R. S., & Diener, E. (1997). Cognitive correlates ofsubjective well-being: The processing of valenced life events byhappy and unhappy persons. Journal of Research in Personality,31, 240-256.

Smith, E. R. (1998). Mental representation and memory. InD. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psy-chology (4th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 391-445). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Storbeck, J., & Clore, G. L. (2005). With sadness comes accuracy,with happiness, false memories: Mood and the false memorieseffect. Psychological Science, 16, 785-791.

Suh, E., Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Triandis, H. C. (1998). The shiftingbasis of life-satisfaction judgements across cultures: Emotions versusnorms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 482-493.

Tamir, M., & Diener, E. (in press). Approach-avoidance goals andwell-being: One size does not fit all. In A. J. Elliot (Ed.),Handbook of approach and avoidance motivation. LawrenceErlbaum.

Taylor, S. F., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (1995). The effect of mindset on pos-itive illusions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69,213-226.

Tellegen, A., Lykken, D. T., Bouchard, T. J., Wilcox, K. J., Segal,N. L., & Rich, S. (1988). Personality similarity in twins rearedapart and together. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,54, 1031-1039.

Uchida, Y., & Kitayama, S. (2005, January). Cultural constructions ofhappiness. Poster presented at the 6th annual meeting of theSociety for Personality and Social Psychology, New Orleans, LA.

Uchida, Y., Norasakkunkit, V., & Kitayama, S. (2004). Cultural con-structions of happiness: Theory and empirical evidence. Journal ofHappiness Studies, 5, 223-239.

Woike, B. A., & Polo, M. (2001). Motive-related memories: Content,structure, and affect. Journal of Personality, 69, 391-415.

Received October 15, 2007Revision accepted August 22, 2008



False memory and the associative network of happiness

Documents

Transcript of False memory and the associative network of happiness