Hadley Christopher B, Mackay Donald G
Psychology Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2006 Jan;32(1):79-88. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.32.1.79.
People recall taboo words better than neutral words in many experimental contexts. The present rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) experiments demonstrated this taboo-superiority effect for immediate recall of mixed lists containing taboo and neutral words matched for familiarity, length, and category coherence. Under binding theory (MacKay et al., 2004), taboo superiority reflects an interference effect: Because the emotional reaction system prioritizes binding mechanisms for linking the source of an emotion to its context, taboo words capture the mechanisms for encoding list context in mixed lists, impairing the encoding of adjacent neutral words when RSVP rates are sufficiently rapid. However, for pure or unmixed lists, binding theory predicted no better recall of taboo-only than of neutral-only lists at fast or slow rates. Present results supported this prediction, suggesting that taboo superiority in immediate recall reflects context-specific binding processes, rather than context-free arousal effects, or emotion-linked differences in rehearsal, processing time, output interference, time-based decay, or guessing biases.
在许多实验情境中，人们对禁忌词汇的记忆优于中性词汇。当前的快速序列视觉呈现（RSVP）实验证明了这种禁忌优势效应，即在即时回忆包含在熟悉度、长度和类别连贯性方面相匹配的禁忌和中性词汇的混合列表时。根据约束理论（MacKay等人，2004年），禁忌优势反映了一种干扰效应：由于情绪反应系统优先考虑将情绪来源与其背景联系起来的约束机制，禁忌词汇在混合列表中占据了编码列表背景的机制，当RSVP速率足够快时，会损害相邻中性词汇的编码。然而，对于纯列表或非混合列表，约束理论预测，在快速或慢速呈现时，仅包含禁忌词汇的列表的回忆效果不会比仅包含中性词汇的列表更好。目前的结果支持了这一预测，表明即时回忆中的禁忌优势反映了特定情境下的约束过程，而不是无情境的唤醒效应，也不是与情绪相关的复述、处理时间、输出干扰、基于时间的衰退或猜测偏差方面的差异。
