Recall of Schematic and Non-Schematic Material Related to Threat in Blood Fearful and Nonfearful Individuals

Abstract

The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that blood fearful and nonfearful individuals would be differentiated by their pattern of recall of schematic and non-schematic prose material. Blood fearful (n=36) and nonfearful (n=40) individuals were presented with five prose passages describing harm or injury. Nine sentences in each passage described events representative of the schema content of most individuals, whereas six sentences in each passage described events that are not representative of typical schema content. Participants read passages that either described themselves experiencing the situations or described themselves witnessing others in the situations and completed a free recall task in both immediate (i.e. 2 minutes) and delayed (i.e. one week) recall conditions. Results did not replicate studies from the cognitive psychology literature on which this study was based. Instead, participants who read passages describing themselves in these situations recalled the gist of the material more accurately than participants who read passages in which they witnessed another individual in the situation. Blood fearful participants recalled the affective tone of neutral passages less accurately than nonfearful participants. Results suggest that activation of schema content has little influence on memory performance, although assessing the affective tone of recalled material detected subtle differences in memory performance between fearful and nonfearful groups.