Honors Theses
Date of Award
2014
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Matthew Reysen
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to determine whether boredom affected memory for positively and negatively valenced words in addition to class names (e.g., History) that were presented in an auditory modality while participants listened to a recorded script. This was accomplished by comparing the recall of a doodling group, who were asked to shade in shapes while listening to a recorded script, with a non-doodling group, who simply listened to the script. The results indicated that participants in the non-doodling group recalled more class names (e.g. History) from the script than participants in the doodling group. In addition, when participants falsely remembered a word related to a word in the script, when the word in the script was positive, the non-doodling group was more likely to respond with an incorrect positive word, and the doodling group was more likely to respond with an incorrect negative word. These results could have implications for both basic research on divided attention as well as applied topics relating to how distractions in the classroom impact memory performance.
Recommended Citation
Kirchner, James, "Boredom and Memory for Positively and Negatively Valenced Words" (2014). Honors Theses. 415.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/415
Accessibility Status
Searchable text