Directed forgetting of faces

Differential effects on happy and neutral faces

Abstract

Directed forgetting effects on happy and neutral faces were investigated using the item method. Participants studied list items of happy or neutral faces. Half of the items are followed by a remember instruction, and half are followed by a forget instruction. Later, participants were tested for their recognition of the identical persons displaying different expressions including those that they were instructed to forget. The results provided evidence for the directed forgetting effect on both happy and neutral faces: Items followed by forget instructions were worse recognized than items followed by remember instructions.