The mere exposure effect with emotionally valenced stimuli: Analytic and nonanalytic processing

In a directed forgetting task, midway through presentation of the list, participants are instructed to forget the first half of the list and to remember the second half of the list. Memory is tested for both to-beforgotten (TBF) and to-be-remembered (TBR) words. Typically, participants recall TBR more often than TBF words, although they remember just as many TBF as TBR words on recognition tests. Such a directed forgetting effect is interpreted in terms of retrieval inhibition, which refers to temporary inaccessibility of learned materials with leaving their availability unaffected. To investigate whether retrieval inhibition emerges using emotionally neutral and negative words, the directed forgetting task was used. Consistent with the previous studies, I obtained the typical directed forgetting effect irrespective of the type of word. However, I found that the effect was disappeared by a concurrent memory load (i. e., six digits) during the presentation of second list. In addition, there were no differences in recognition tests. These results suggest that learning the second list is critical to the directed forgetting effect for the affective valence of the word stimuli.