ABSTRACT

The experimental status of repression is still uncertain. We propose a possible way to operationalize it as succesful intentional forgetting of negative information. Our experiment was aiming to evaluate the impact of intentional forgetting of emotionally laden information on explicit and implicit memory. We found that (a) intentional forgetting is successful for emotional as well as neutral information; (b) the magnitude of forgetting is larger for explicit thanfor implicit memory; (c ) intention to forget affect in the same way the encodig and retrieval of task information.

KEYWORDS: intentional forgetting, repression, defence mechanisms.