When talking about absence, we may express it in a negative statement (using explicit negation e.g. I was not ) or in a positive statement (using implicit negation e.g. I wished I were ). Previous research has shown that explicitly negated statements may cause false recall–negated items may paradoxically be remembered as present. The current study compares false recall caused by implicit and explicit negation. Participants listened to a recording in which some objects were mentioned as present, some as absent, and some not mentioned at all. The absence of objects was expressed using explicit or implicit negation. Participants’ recall of the recording was measured either five minutes or one week after exposure to the recording. Results indicate that implicit and explicit negation lead to a nearly identical false recall of negated items. However, items not mentioned in the recording (i.e. neither mentioned nor negated) were more often recognized as present by participants exposed to implicit, rather than explicit negation. We postulate that false recall of negated items could be explained by participants remembering the item itself, but forgetting the context in which it was present (an affirmative or a negative statement), hence objects would be recalled as present just because they were spoken of.
The Macbeth effect is a metaphorical association between physical and moral cleanliness -transgression of one's morality leads to increased desire to clean oneself (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006). Earlier studies examined psychological associations between bodily and moral purity according to controlled processes, such as rating product desirability. The influence of the Macbeth effect on more automatic processes (stimuli processing speed) was explored in three studies. We examined whether thinking about one's moral transgression (Studies 1 and 3) or others' immoral behavior (Study 2) contributed to slower reaction times (RTs) to stimuli related to physical purification. It seems that automatic processes may also be affected by the metaphor "morality is purity": It is manifested in slower RTs to stimuli associated with bodily cleansing when recalling one's own past transgressions (Study 3) and in slower responses to words connected with purification of the external world while recalling immoral behaviors of others (Study 2).
important of them include the volitional (e.g. I do not want to go to the cinema) and logical-corrective functions (e.g. That's not true -our players did not lose the game yesterday). The latter function of negation consists in the reversal of meaning, declaration of falsity of someone's utterance, correction of statements, or contradiction of something (see Maciuszek, 2018). Additionally, in everyday communication one of the primary functions of negation is to inform about the absence of certain objects (e.g. There are no bookcases in the house) as well as to deny events and behavior (Maciuszek & Polczyk, 2017).Negation has many functions and there are numerous ways to express negation, as well as different classifications of negation types (see Dahl, 2011). This paper concerns the distinction between asserted and non-asserted negation, which is defined respectively as explicit and implicit negation. As noted by Clark (1974), explicit negation (EN for short) is constituted by such words as no, not, never, nobody. In addition to negative particles (e.g. not happy), overt negation may be expressed by affixes (e.g. unhappy); therefore within explicit negation, a distinction is drawn between morphological (affixal) negation and sentence negation. Clark also includes explicitly negative quantifiers such as scarcely, hardly, few, seldom, little, only which do not contain overt negative morphology, but are considered explicit negation. On the other hand, implicit negation (IN for short) is constituted by pragmatic inferences and it may be conveyed using such words as forget, fail, doubt, deny (Xiang, Grove & Giannakidou, 2016; see also Fodor, Fodor & Garrett, 1975). The description of the same facts may be expressed by explicit or implicit negation: He did not give me my money back (EN) or I wish he had given me the money back (IN). The teacher was not there (EN) or The teacher was absent (IN).
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