Host: The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology
Social elaboration refers to the addition of information about a person to the target. The present study investigated the effects of the emotionality and the congruity of person's information on incidental memory. Participants were 38 undergraduates. Each participant was presented a target and a famous person's name, and asked to rate the congruity between the targets and the person's name, and also asked to rate the pleasantness of the person, followed by an unexpected free recall test. The main result showed that targets associated with congruous, pleasant person's name were recalled more often than those with incongruous, emotionally neutral person's name. Thie result was interpreted as showing that the targets elaborated by a person's information were integrated into cognitive structure only if the person's information aroused a strong emotion.
