After finding all the sources I mentioned in my last post, I made my own investigation designed to test State-dependent memory as well as to
assess the “arousal hypothesis” found by Levinger and Clark (1961). The method includes a few changes I made to their original investigation,
and shall explain why they were made.
I sampled
my participants through snowball sampling, so I asked those from whom I gained
confidence to participate and through them found others who took part. This way
I had willing participants who co-operated throughout the process. The 4
participants were male and female: two adults and two 16 year-olds. This way the
results were comparable by both gender and age, thus increasing the conclusion’s
confidence.
Each participant was given a word-association test, in which I read out a series of simple words and asked them to say what each word caused them to think of immediately. My independent variable was the emotional charge of the words; some of them had neutral meanings, such as door, carpet, or photo, whilst an equal amount was negatively charged, like anger, pain, or scream. I also introduced just as many positively charged words, like success, cheerful, and smile. For two of the tests, I asked participants to recall their exact initial associations as the same list of words is read out again; while the other two participants were given the recall test a week later.
The
dependent variable was how long it took for each participant to recall the way
they had associated each word in the first test. I measured this by recording
the sessions and timing their answers. The time it took them to recall an
association was compared to the emotional charge of the cue word, therefore
deciding if there is a relationship between difficulty in retrieval and the
emotional material being remembered (as theorised by McCormick & Mayer,
1991).
I
included positively charged words, unlike the original study, to assess whether
the cause of retrieval difficulty is simply that – when in a neutral state –
people find it harder to recall emotional material, or that it’s the type of emotional meaning that the word
has that affects recall of material. For example, if someone found it easier to
recall negative associations than neutral ones it could be because they experienced
negative arousal at the time of recollection. Therefore, by using this range of
emotional arousal, I tested for a difference between the principals of
state-dependent memory and Freud’s repression hypothesis (1901).
Also, in
order to further assess the possible difference between state-dependent
forgetting and motivated-forgetting, my decision to add a delay to one group of
the participants mimics that of Parkin et
al (1982). Like my investigation, their participants were asked to recall
their associations seven days after the initial test to see if the findings of
Levinger and Clark would be reversed, so with two groups under either condition,
I was able to assess both studies.
