Memories associated to the self: equivalence of representations of friends and enemies

Abstract

Greenwald and Banaji (1989) have shown that common words used together with personally relevant items (such as friends' names) are recalled much better than items used with non-personally relevant items (such as names of unknown people) and have interpreted the effect as based on differential cognitive processing of materials. To assess the possibility that the effect may depend on the positive affective value of friends' names, the present study replicated Greenwald and Banaji's, including enemies' names besides the other ones. There was no significant difference between recall of material associated to friends' or enemies' names; recall of both was superior to that of material associated to unknown people's names. The degree of liking/disliking of friends and enemies was not linked to different recall performance. Such results reinforce a cognitive interpretation of memory facilitation of self relevant materials.