The emotional content of words can affect both true and false memory performance. One hypothesis suggests that the effects of emotion on memory stem from the semantic cohesion of these words. Emotional words are better remembered because they are more inter-related than neutral words (semantic cohesion hypothesis). Although support for this assumption has been found in tasks that measure true memory, less is known about how the structure of lexical knowledge affects emotional false memories. This is partially due to the scarcity of norms that capture the pre-existing knowledge structure of verbal materials commonly used to investigate emotional false memories, such as the Deese/Roediger-McDermott word lists. In this study, we present inter-item association norms for the 44 lists of the Brazilian version of the DRM paradigm. Free-association responses were collected from a sample of 1,042 undergraduates and were used to estimate the level of connectivity among the words present in the DRM lists. Connectivity measures were then used to test the semantic cohesion hypothesis. No significant correlations were found between the emotional measures (valence and arousal) and the connectivity measures. The results do not give support to the semantic cohesion hypothesis and suggest that, for the Brazilian version of DRM lists, inter-item association and emotionality can be independently manipulated.
DRM lists; free association; inter-item association; false memory; emotion
