A Comparative Study of Emotional False Memories in Children with Dyslexia and their Normal Peers

Memory, its improvement, weakness, error and/or interference have always been attractive issues. Humans have always been trying to improve their memory.  Since people rarely forget the memory of the events related to feelings and emotions, it is distorted less than the memory related to neutral information. Some people may even remember things that have never really happened; it is a false remembrance or recognition. A survey on the impacts of emotional loads on people’s memory clearance indicates that not only does the emotional content lead to memory improvement, but also emotional-laden words increase the possibility for people to remember the words’ specific features. Emotional items are better remembered and easily organized because they are more connected conceptually. These conceptual connections improve success of remembrance. Emotional load suggests a high level of familiarity and relation. Emotional information is open to semantic intensity more than neutral information is. So emotional items are processed more deeply and more richly than neutral ones. This fact can, in turn, lead to an increase in the quantity of relational process and a decrease in the quantity of discriminability of emotional items, thus increasing false remembrance. So prioritization of emotional items in real memory may be related to an increase in the quantity of differentiation and conceptual connections. Studies applying neuropsychological methods have confirmed that children suffering from learning disabilities are not capable enough in semantic processing and decoding of the texts read. There have been many investigations indicating a memory deficiency in these people and diverse methods have been used to help them solve memory problems. So the present research has been conducted to compare emotional false memory in children with dyslexia and the ones without it. Causal-comparative method has been used in this research. The research has involved two groups of third grade girl students in the city of Qom. The first group included ordinary students and the second was comprised of students with dyslexia under instructions in learning disorder centers. Using convenience sampling, two groups of fifteen students (fifteen ordinary students and fifteen students with dyslexia) were chosen from all four districts of the city. Statistical criteria used to answer the questions include arithmetic mean, standard deviation and T test. Tools used include Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM), with 80% multiplier in remembrance test and 85% multiplier in recognition test, reading disorder test which reliability has been reported by Cronbach’s alpha criterion, and Raven’s IQ test which stability has been between 83% and 93% in different studies. In most dimensions of false remembrance and recognition, students without dyslexia got a higher arithmetic mean. Arithmetic mean of scores related to the emotional words’ remembrance and emotional words’ false recognition in students without dyslexia was higher than the ones with dyslexia; there  was a statistically meaningful difference between them (P=0.001, P<0.05). Due to the findings, it is indicated that children suffering from learning disability have memory deficiency but emotional load may make semantic relation between words and increase recognition error. The method is suggested to improve and recover memory.