Falsas memórias autobiográficas: o que é possível recordar de um evento inesquecível

• Ano de defesa: 2012
• Autor(a) principal: Nascimento, Juliana Maria Steffen do
• Orientador(a): Stein, Lilian Milnitsky
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul; Porto Alegre
• Palavras-chave em Português: PSICOLOGIA; MEMÓRIA AUTOBIOGRÁFICA; MEMÓRIA - ASPECTOS PSICOLÓGICOS
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/10923/4991

The present dissertation investigates possible relationships between plausibility and emotionality in the creation of false autobiographical memories about a remarkable occurrence in the history life of a person. The investigation involved a study with undergraduated students from various courses at different graduation ceremonies. The dissertation consists of two empirical studies organized as two scientific papers. In the first study it was elaborated an instrument to assess the autobiographical memory about a given event, according to a process consisting of three stages. The main goal of the first stage was to collected many different kinds of events, which could occur during graduation ceremonies. 20 undergraduates from different courses have taken part in this stage by describing 10 events with high frequency of occurrence and 10 with low frequency of occurrence. In the second stage it was identified the plausibility rate of the collect events. There were 126 participants, which rated plausibility. In the third stage it was elaborated the Graduation Events Inventory based on Life Events Inventory – LEI taking into account the information, which was collected at the previous stages. The events in the new inventory were classified according to plausibility (high or low), occurrence (true or false), and valence (positive or negative). The second study investigated aspects of false autobiographical memories. The objective of the study was to determine if the plausibility and emotionality associated with an event could influence the creation of false autobiographical memories. The investigation was performed taking into account the video tapes of graduation ceremonies and a list of events that are more likely to occur in such cerimonies.The study involved two groups of undergraduates from different courses in different graduation ceremonies, which have occurred two years and eight months before the collecting of data. The Group 1 was composed of 16 participants and the Group 2 had 26 participants. Both groups answered the Graduation Events Inventory by filling out a form on the internet. The findings of this study indicate that the plausibility of event occurrences affects the creation of false autobiographical memories: highly plausible events lead to more false memories than events with low plausibility. The interaction between plausibility and valence shows that low plausible, negative events present a substantial reduction of false autobiographical memories, differently from the positive events. The results also indicated that there are fewer false autobiographical memories for negative events than for positive events. The obtained results also show that the methodology developed to assess the autobiographical memories is consistent, since the findings for the Group 1 were replicated in the Group 2.