According to a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, adults who experience attachment anxiety tend to have false memories more often than people with different personality types.
Researchers randomly assigned participants to watch lengthy videos of a female character engaging in specific conversations or hearing an audio version of it only.
“The present article describes three studies that replicate the correlation between attachment anxiety and false memories. Moreover, the present studies experimentally explored the boundary conditions under which anxiety might predict false memories,” the study’s authors articulated in their study.
“Results indicated that attachment anxiety predicts false memories only when participants could see a video of another person conveying information—but not when reading a text transcript of the same information or when listening to the audio only.”
“This is consistent with prior studies which suggest that highly attachment-anxious individuals are hypervigilant to others’ emotional expressions and may use them to make incorrect inferences (which potentially become falsely encoded into memory).”
