Better To Recall Positive, Negative Words Or Neutral Words

After studying these articles, the research question for this experiment is; is it easier to recall positive, negative words or neutral words? To answer this question, an experiment will be conducted. The experiment will have positive, negative and neutral words shown to the participants, and they will have to recall at the end as many words as they can. The prediction for this is that more negative words will be remembered overall, as negative emotions can greatly affect people no matter what they are feeling.

Doerksen & Shimamura (2001) investigated whether or not emotional words affect memory compared to neutral words. They did this, as they wanted to know the extent of enhancing emotions on recalling items previously presented to participants affect the

Doerksen & Shimamura (2001) conducted three experiments to test this. For all experiments, they used 24 undergraduates from University of California, Berkeley. In the first experiment, 164 words were produced, 64 neutral and 64 emotional. Participants silently watched the randomised words on the monitor, which were shown for two seconds each for five minutes. The words were also either in yellow or blue. After this, participants then wrote down as many of the words they could recall. Following this, the words were then shown in black, and the participants had to determine which of the words were in yellow, blue or was a new word. Experiment two was conducted similarly, except the words were shown in black with a white background, which had a yellow or blue border. A third experiment was then conducted, similar to the second experiment except the emotional words were replaced with categorical words. From conducting these experiments, Doerksen & Shimamura (2001) got similar results for all three