An Experimental Research About Repressors' Memory Of Emotional Information

Repressive personality is a personality type which is the combination of low trait anxiety and high defensiveness. It was proposed by Weinberger who is a western psychologist in 70s in the 20 century, and has been the interesting subject of psychological research since it was proposed. Individuals who have repressive personality trait are called repressors, and others are called non-repressors. Many researches about repressive personality found that repressors had an avoidant processing style in memory process, that is to say, repressors had difficulty in recalling negative emotional information. However, some researchers didn't agree with this view. There are different views on the mechanic underlying cognitive processing. Some think that avoidant processing in repressors' memory for negative emotional information is at the encoding phase. Some think that the avoidant processing is at the retrieval phase. However, Some think that the avoidant processing is not just at the encoding phase, but also at the retrieval phase.The main aim of the present research was to investigate the effect of repressors' memory for the negative emotional information and its underlying cognitive process. On base of review on many researches, the present research designed two experiments, which used positive emotional words, negative emotional words and neutral emotional words and divided subjects into repressors and non-repressors. The first experiment adopted free memory task .Subjects was asked to study three kinds of emotional words, after a distractor task they were given 5min to write down as many words as they could recall. The second experiment adopted try and error task .Subjects were asked to learn the pressing keys correctly of every emotional word by try and error.The present research put forwarded some hypothesis: (1) Repressors would remember significant less negative emotional words than positive emotional words and natural words remembered by themselves. (2) If avoidant memory effect on repressors was at the encoding phase, repressors would allocate fewer encoding processing time for negative emotional words than positive emotional words and neutral words. If avoidant memory effect on repressors was at the retrieve phase, repressors would allocate fewer retrieving processing time for negative emotional words than positive emotional words and neutral words. If avoidant memory is at the both encoding phase and retrieval phase, repressors would allocate fewer encoding processing time and retrieving processing time for negative emotional words than positive emotional words and natural words on both phases.By statistical analysis, the main findings of the present research are as follows:(1) The pattern of repressors' memory effect was that the interaction between personality level and emotional words' valence had a significant effect on the recall of emotional words. Specially, repressors remembered significant less negative emotional words than positive emotional words and natural words remembered by theirselves, and repressors remembered significant less negative emotional words than non-repressors but not for positive emotional words and natural words.(2) The underlying cognitive process was at the encoding phase, not retrieval phase. At the encoding phase, repressors allocated fewer processing time for negative emotional words than positive emotional words and natural words. At the retrieval encoding phase, repressors allocated more processing time for negative emotional words than positive emotional words and natural words .And repressors allocated more processing time for negative emotional words than non-repressors, but not positive emotional words and natural words.