Effect of Direction Type, Emotional Valence of Words And Gender on Directed Forgetting

Abstract

In the present study, the effects of emotional valence of words and gender on directed forgetting were investigated. The directed forgetting effect was investigated by requiring from participants to forget the words that they have to recall and at the same time, to recall the words that they have to forget. The study was composed of two experiments. In the first experiment, the participants were presented with a list of words consisting of neutral and emotional words once, while the participants were presented with the same list twice in the second experiment. Both experiments were composed of two stages. Under the item method, the words which were presented with the directions of forget or recall in the first stage were presented again with the directions of recall what you have forgotten or forget what you have recalled in the second stage. In the both stages, the subjects were given a free recall test for all the words presented before. In the end of the study, a directed forgetting effect was observed in the first stage but not in the second stage. In both experiments, when the words which they were wanted to be forgotten in the first stage were studied again, they were recalled as much as the words which they were asked to be recalled in the first stage. This refers to release of retrieval inhibition. When the words which were asked to be forgotten in the first stage were required to be recalled in the second stage, the participants could succeed to inhibit the words which they were not wanted to be recalled with extra time and opportunity to study. It was found that as inhibition of emotional words was more difficult than neutral ones, inhibition of positive words was harder than negative and neutral ones. Moreover, any significant gender differences in terms of directed forgetting was not observed.