Can You Forget To Forget It?

Directed forgetting (DF ) refers damaged content of our memory caused by the "forget"instruction made by the experimenter. Our study used the item-paradigm to investigate how does subjects'diffrent levels of effort affect the directed forgetting on the positive andnegative affective pictures and words.In the first study,we adopted 2*2*3within-subjects experimental design.With emotional words(postive words & negative words), instruction(remember & forget) and diffrent subjects' effort (20% effort;60% effort & 100% effort) as the independent variables, we told subjects that they should put relevant effort as the number became big,with recognitional accuracy and the value of directed forgetting as dependent variables.The results showed that, there existed directed forgetting in both postive and negative words,and that as subjects put more effort, both recognitional accuracy and the value of directed forgetting would became better.In the second study, we just replaced the words to emotional pictures including positive and negative pictures, the other procedure was totally like study one.The results tells us that recognitional accuracy of positive pictures was better than negative ones, there existed directed forgetting only in negative pictures, as for the recognitional accuracy,100% effort was better than 20% effort than 60% effort and that the value of directed forgetting of 100% effort and the 60% effort peformed worse than 20% effort.In a word, contrast the results of two studies, we came to two conclusions, one is that emotional words peformed better than the pictures in the value of directed forgetting, the other is that emotional pictures' DF didn't affect by subjects' different effort, but as for affectional words, as you tried harder to forget these words, you could get the better result.we explain the results as it's different processing mechanism when we processed emotional words and pictures, the procedure of pictures' DF supports inhibition theory, the postive words' DF supports selective search theory while the negative words' DF sustains dual processes theory.