Dimenticanza intenzionale, memorie traumatiche e psicopatologia: il contenuto emozionale degli stimoli influenza il directed forgetting?

The directed forgetting is an adaptive mechanism aimed at helping the individual to deal with psychological conflicts, anxiety and pain.The individual shows the ability to intentionally forget and to exclude from consciuosness stressful events, traumatic experiences or particularly unpleasant material. The basis of this ability has been postulated in the intervention of executive control of memory mechanisms that inhibit unwanted memories, exempting them from awareness. The aim of the present research was to investigate: a) the directed forgetting effect for verbal stimuli; b) the influence of emotional content of stimuli on the directed forgetting effect; c) the relationship between subjective disease of the participant and the directed forgetting phenomenon. Forty-one subjects with no history of specific pathologies, participated to the experiment. They were divided into two groups: half participants were randomly assigned to the condition “to forget” and the remaining were assigned to the condition “to remember”. In the present study it was possible to observe only one of the three effects typically seen in the directed forgetting procedure. Infact, data have showed a greater final recall number of words of the list 2 items compared to List 1 items in the forgetting condition. No significant data were observed for the other findings typically seen in the directed forgetting procedure. Subjects in the forget condition didn’t show a deficit in the List 1 final recall compared to subjects in the remember condition (costs) and subjects in the forget conditions didn’t recall more List 2 items than do individuals in the remember condition (benefits). Moreover, in the current study, the directed forgetting task would not seem to be influenced by the emotional content of words.