Personality differences in remembering future intentions and intentional forgetting

Authors

Buket Yılmaz¹, Meral Bozdemir², Sevtap Cinan^1,*

¹Psychology Department, Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey
²Psychology Department, Maltepe University, Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract

This study aimed to examine individual differences in personality in relation to memory for future intentions with different contents (good, bad, and neutral intentions) by using a directed forgetting paradigm. The Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ) and a personality test were administered to a total of 298 university students in the first testing session. In the second testing session a directed forgetting of future intentions (DFFI) task was used to assess memory performance of four different groups with high or low scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness. The results showed that levels of self-reported memory failures were higher in both the low conscientiousness and the low agreeableness groups compared to the levels reported by the groups who scored high on these personality dimensions. However, objective performance-based assessments demonstrated that, compared to their low-score counterparts, the high conscientiousness and the high agreeableness groups had a poorer performance on the DFFI task. In addition, the number of bad intentions to be forgotten but falsely retrieved were found to be fewer compared to good and neutral intentions for all individuals with low or high personality scores.

Keywords: future intentions, memory, directed forgetting, personality, conscientiousness, agreeableness

PAGES:163-174

doi:10.24193/cbb.2018.22.11

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