Retrieval-induced forgetting of negative stimuli: The role of emotional intensity

Abstract

Repeatedly retrieving a subset of previously studied items can cause forgetting of related non-retrieved material. We examined whether such retrieval-induced forgetting holds also for negative material. Participants studied neutral and negative stimuli and then repeatedly retrieved a subset of the neutral material. Later, a recall test was conducted in which participants were asked to recall all previously studied items. On average, retrieval practice on the neutral items caused the same amount of forgetting for neutral and negative items, indicating that the emotionality of material does not affect retrieval-induced forgetting. More detailed analysis, however, revealed that the forgetting of negative items decreased with both the emotional intensity of a negative item and the dispositional negative affectivity of a participant. The decreases in retrieval-induced forgetting may have been driven by item-specific processing of material, which is known to be enhanced for highly negative stimuli and participants high in dispositional negative affectivity and to reduce or even eliminate retrieval-induced forgetting.

Keywords:

• Episodic memory
• Emotion
• Retrieval-induced forgetting
• Material
• Dispositional affectivity

Acknowledgements

The research reported here was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to Karl-Heinz Bäuml (Ba 1382/7–1).

We thank the two anonymous referees for their comments on a previous version of the manuscript.

Notes

¹One critical item had to be excluded from the study because recall for the negative version of this item was more than two standard deviations below recall for the neutral or distinctive version, revealing a poor fit between the negative picture and the denoted exemplar.

²The same relationships between emotional intensity and forgetting arose when using the ratings obtained from the independent sample. Again, intensity was positively correlated with the amount of forgetting observed for negative critical items, r=.43, p<.05, and uncorrelated with the amount of forgetting observed for both the neutral and the distinctive versions of the items, ps>.50.