Yüzdeki Duygunun ve Bağlamın Yönlendirilmiş Unutma Üzerindeki Etkisi

Abstract

The aim of this thesis was to examine the validity of the context change hypothesis (Sahakyan and Kelley, 2002), one of the explanations of directed forgetting, using the item method. For this purpose, two experiments were designed. Emotional and neutral facial expressions were used as items to be remembered, while emotional and neutral sounds served as contexts. The experiments differed based on the timing of context presentation. In Experiment 1, the contexts were presented simultaneously with the facial expressions, whereas in Experiment 2, the contexts were presented after the remember/forget instruction. Both experiments included “A” and “B” subgroups. In Experiment 1A (N = 46) and 2A (N = 46), the facial expressions were neutral, and the contexts were emotional (happiness and fear). In Experiment 1B (N = 46) and 2B (N = 46), the contexts were neutral, while the facial expressions were emotional (happy and fearful). A recognition memory task was employed during the test phase to assess participants’ memory performance. Analyses were conducted within the framework of Signal Detection Theory (Hautus, et al., 2022), and participants' memory sensitivity and response bias were calculated. A 2 (Instruction: Remember, Forget) x 2 (Context: Happiness, Fear) repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted for Experiments 1A and 2A. Similarly, a 2 (Instruction: Remember, Forget) x 2 (Facial Expression: Happy, Fearful) repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted for Experiments 1B and 2B. Memory sensitivity results revealed that the directed forgetting effect occurred only in Experiment 2A, where the contexts were presented after the remember/forget instruction. In the remember condition, neutral faces presented in a happy context were remembered better than those in a fearful context. However, no significant effect of contexts was observed in the forget condition. Regarding response bias, significant bias was observed only in Experiments 1B and 2B, specifically for fearful facial expressions.