Abstract
Repeatedly retrieving a subset of previously studied items can cause forgetting of related nonretrieved material. We examined whether such retrievalinduced 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 ...
Abstract
Repeatedly retrieving a subset of previously studied items can cause forgetting of related nonretrieved material. We examined whether such retrievalinduced 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 itemspecific 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.
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