Recalling Taboo and Nontaboo Words

Abstract

People remember emotional and taboo words better than neutral words. It is well known that words that are processed at a deep (i.e., semantic) level are recalled better than words processed at a shallow (i.e., purely visual) level. To determine how depth of processing influences recall of emotional and taboo words, a levels of processing paradigm was used. Whether this effect holds for emotional and taboo words has not been previously investigated. Two experiments demonstrated that taboo and emotional words benefit less from deep processing than do neutral words. This is consistent with the proposal that memories for taboo and emotional words are a function of the arousal level they evoke, even under shallow encoding conditions. Recall was higher for taboo words, even when taboo words were cued to be recalled after neutral and emotional words. The superiority of taboo word recall is consistent with cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging research.

Emotion and Explicit Verbal Memory: Evidence Using Malay Lexicon

“…It was an advantageous effect where valence improved memory, in this case explicit memory. The present results are somewhat inconsistent with some of the previous studies which have found an advantage of positive emotion over negative ones (D'Argembeau et al, 2005;White, 2002;Jay et al, 2008). Here, we found that both positive and negative words increased memory.…”

Taboo, emotionally valenced, and emotionally neutral word norms

“…It was expected that, consistent with much previous research (e.g., Harris et al, 2003;Jay et al, 2008;Kensinger & Corkin, 2004), taboo words would be rated as more arousing than either emotionally valenced or emotionally neutral words. Currently, no imageability data are available for taboo words, although some exist for valenced nontaboo words (see, e.g., Altarriba & Bauer, 2004).…”

Taboo semantics

“…Evidence informing theories of cognitive architecture associated language processing suggest that taboo terms receive more shallow processing than neutral terms even though taboo expressions tend to be the easier to recall [22]. The cultural specificity of taboo bursts in Tourette's is noteworthy [2].…”