Honors Theses
Date of Award
Spring 5-10-2025
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Matthew Reysen
Second Advisor
Andrew Hales
Third Advisor
Joseph Wellman
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
Background. Psychologists have long been interested in studying memory retention, the ability to retain or recall information. Many experiments show that survival processing, which involves encoding information in the context of survival scenarios, has consistently been demonstrated to be one of the best deep processing tasks identified to date. Memory performance following survival processing has been compared with other conditions universally accepted to produce excellent retention, such as processing information using imagery, pleasantness instructions, and self-reference processing. The present study compares the survival processing condition with an ostracism processing condition. It was hypothesized that ostracism processing might perform similarly to survival processing, given that both tasks share an evolutionary basis.
Methods. This study employed a between-subjects design consisting of three sets of processing instructions: survival, ostracism, and pleasantness. Participants were asked to rate 30 unrelated common nouns with respect to the word's relevance to the condition to which they had been randomly assigned. Each word was presented for 5s on a computer screen and rated on a 5-point Likert scale. Participants completed five practice trials before rating the experimental stimuli. After participants had finished rating the words, they were asked to complete simple math problems for 60s. After the distractor task, participants had five minutes to type as many previously rated words as they could remember.
Results. Overall, participants in both the survival and ostracism conditions remembered more words than participants in the pleasantness condition. There was no significant difference in recall performance between participants’ performance in the survival and ostracism conditions.
Conclusion. Overall, this study demonstrates that when participants process words using an ostracism scenario, their recall performance is comparable to that of participants in a survival condition, and both conditions produce superior recall performance to that of participants who engage in pleasantness processing.
Recommended Citation
East, Julia R., "Processing Words Using an Ostracism Avoidance Scenario Improves Recall Performance" (2025). Honors Theses. 3231.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/3231
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