Directed Forgetting in Undergraduate Students of Psychology With or Without Traumatic Childhood Experiences

In directed forgetting research, participants are instructed to forget information recently learned, and asked instead to remember new information given later. When asked to recall both the to-be-remembered and the to-be-forgotten information, participants successfully exhibit directed forgetting by recalling more to-be-remembered material, than to-be-forgotten material. In the present study, two directed forgetting list method experiments were conducted on undergraduate students of psychology (n = 25; n = 78). The aim of the study was to see if retrieval inhibition between participants with or without traumatic childhood experiences differed, when presented with negative or positive words. All participants were screened for childhood trauma with the CTQ-SF. The participants in the second experiment were additionally screened for dissociation with the DES-II. While Experiment 1, possibly due to small sample size failed to attain a directed forgetting effect, Experiment 2 succeeded. The issue of childhood trauma did not influence the directed forgetting effect