How Affect and Repetition Influence Judgments of Truth

People believe repeated statements more than new ones, a phenomenon called the repetition -induced truth effect. It is chiefly explained with the subjective processing ease (i.e., fluency) for repeated as compared to new information. To date, the role of affective processes for the repeti-tion-induced truth effect is rather unclear. Different mechanisms may play a role: Affect influences processing styles, it may directly inform judgments, and positive affect may be misattributed to fluency/familiarity. In the current study, we compared mechanisms and tested whether a positive, neutral, or negative picture presented before a statement would influence the repetition-induced truth effect. Experiment 1 followed a classical repetition-induced truth effect procedure with two sessions that were a week apart. In the second session, each statement was preceded by an affec-tive picture. We replicated the repetition-induced truth effect, and we observed a statistically sig-nificant main effect of affect-statements were rated as truer after a positive rather than a negative or neutral picture, but the interaction between repetition and affect was not statistically significant. In Experiment 2, we aimed to clarify the mechanism behind this finding using only new statements preceded by affective pictures. No statistically significant main effect of affect emerged. We con-clude that the results in Experiment 1 were due to the misattribution of positive affect to fluency/ familiarity, enhancing the perceived truth of the statements. In sum, our results suggest two factors that enhance truth judgments: repetition and positive affect, but the effects of affect depend on the exact paradigm used.