EFFECTS OF SOCIAL ELABORATION ON INTENTIONAL MEMORY OF WORDS HIROSHI TOYOTA

The present study compared the effects of social and semantic elaboration on incidental memory. Two types of lists were provided to the participants: (1) a related list, in which a triplet of words had a common category name associated with each of them, and (2) an unrelated list, in which the three words did not have a common category name. Then, participants in the social elaboration condition generated a particular person’s name, and those in the semantic elaboration condition generated an association elicited by the three words. An unexpected free recall task followed. Results indicated higher recall of the related list in the social elaboration than in the semantic elaboration condition. In contrast, the unrelated list showed no difference between the two elaboration conditions. These results indicate that social elaboration functions as within-item elaboration, which is more effective than semantic elaboration.

This study examined the relationship between the recall of chosen words and congruity between the selection criterion and type of pairs in intentional memory. Participants were asked to select a more pleasant or unpleasant word from two types of pairs, pleasant--neutral and unpleasant--neutral, and to remember the chosen word presented in the learning phase, followed by the free recall phase. Although the pleasant words selected from the pleasant--neutral pairs were equally recalled as in the unpleasant--neutral pairs, the chosen unpleasant words from unpleasant--neutral pairs were recalled more often than those in the pleasant--neutral pairs. These results suggest that the recall of the chosen words was determined by the congruity between the criteria of choosing and the type of paired words and the negativity bias in memory.

The present study investigated the differences in the attributes of episode that participants remembered between recalled words and non-recalled ones in incidental free recall. Participants were asked to judge whether an episode came to mind when each target word was presented in the orienting task phase, followed by an unexpected free recall and rating phases. In the rating phase, they were asked to rate the degree of three attributes, vividness, pleasantness, and nostalgia, for each episode. Positive correlations among the three attributes were observed for episodes of recalled words, whereas for episodes of non-recalled words, they were not. These results showed strong relationships among the attributes of episodes that were determinants of the effectiveness of autobiographical elaboration on incidental recall regarding distinctiveness.

The present study was conducted to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and the likelihood of the bizarreness effect. Participants in the emotion condition were asked to rate the degree of strange feelings elicited by sentences and participants in the image condition were asked to rate the vividness of images elicited by sentences. The level of EI in participants was assessed with the J-ESCQ (Toyota, Morita & Takšić, 2007). EI was negatively correlated with the recall performance of bizarre sentences for participants in the emotion condition. Results indicate that differences in EI contribute to the likelihood of the bizarreness effect, and that EI suppresses the emotional arousal caused by bizarre sentences.