91

10 9 British Journal of Psychology (2009), 100, 9 I-I 0

Q 2009 The British Psychological Society

The British Psychological Society

www.bpsjournals.co.uk

The word concreteness effect occurs for positive,

but not negative, emotion words in immediate serial recall

2 Chi-Shing TseI* and Jeanette Altarriba
2

'Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, New York, USA The present study examined the roles of word concreteness and word valence in the immediate serial recall task. Emotion words (e.g. happy) were used to investigate these effects. Participants completed study-test trials with seven-item study lists consisting of positive or negative words with either high or low concreteness (Experiments I and 2) and neutral (i.e. non-emotion) words with either high or low concreteness (Experiment 2). For neutral words, the typical word concreteness effect (concrete words are better recalled than abstract words) was replicated. For emotion words, the effect occurred for positive words, but not for negative words. While the word concreteness effect was stronger for neutral words than for negative words, it was not different for the neutral words and the positive words. We conclude that both word valence and word concreteness simultaneously contribute to the item and order retention of emotion words and discuss how Hulme et aL's (1997) item redintegration account can be modified to explain these findings.

In this paper, we report two experiments investigating the effects of word concreteness and word valence in immediate serial recall for emotion words, including emotion-label (e.g. happy, hatred) and emotion-laden words (e.g. baby,jail) in order to examine whether Hulme et al.'s (1997) item redintegration account can explain the effect of these two semantic variables on serial recall performance. Before describing the details of these experiments, we briefly review the relevant literature and describe how item redintegration has been used to explain serial recall performance in general. The word concreteness effect refers to the finding that concrete words (e.g. pencil) are better remembered than abstract words (e.g. wisdom). Paivio (1986, see Schwanenflugel, Akin, & Luh, 1992, for an alternative explanation) attributed this
* Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Chi-Shing Tse, Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis,

MO 63130, USA (e-mail: dtse@artsci.wustl.edu).

DOL 10.1348/000712608X318617

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Ch?-Shing Tse and JeanetteAltarriba

effect to the referent images that can only be evoked by concrete words but not by abstract words during memory retrieval. The memory system can process two functionally independent yet interconnected codes: verbal and imaginal. Both concrete and abstract words are represented by verbal codes, but since concrete words can be imaged more easily than abstract words, they are also associated with imaginal codes, which provide an additional means through which concrete words are stored and retrieved. Therefore, concrete words are better remembered than abstract words. This effect has been found in free recall (e.g. Paivio), episodic recognition (e.g. Gorman, 1961), and immediate serial recall (e.g. Allen & Hulme, 2006; Paivio, Yuille, & Rogers, 1969; Tse & Altarriba, 2007; Walker & Hulme, 1999). In a typical trial of an immediate serial recall task, participants are first visually or auditorily presented 5-12 study items, one at a time. Immediately after the presentation of the last item, they recall the study items by writing, typing, or vocalizing them in their presentation order. Serial recall performance was quantified by the proportion of items correctly recalled in their serial positions. Using sevenitem study lists, auditory presentation and spoken/written recall, Walker and Hulme (1999) found an item concreteness effect, serial recall was better for concrete word lists than for abstract word lists, but not an order concreteness effect, conditionalized order errors (i.e. the number of correctly recalled words reported in incorrect serial positions divided by the number of correctly recalled words irrespective of their serial positions, cf. Murdock, 1976) did not differ for concrete and abstract words. That is, after controlling the level of item recall, order retention was not affected by word concreteness in the immediate serial recall task (see Allen & Huime, 2006, for conflicting evidence). Walker and Hulme (1999) employed Hulme et al.'s (1997) item redintegration account to explain their item concreteness effect (and the absence of an order concreteness effect). According to this account, the phonological representations of study items are likely degraded over time. During serial recall, participants can facilitate their retrieval by calling upon the long-term knowledge (meaning and/or phonology) of these items. Because concrete words are associated with richer and more accessible long-term memory representations, such as those closely related to common objects in the world (cf. Paivio, 1986), their extensive associations should enhance item redintegration to a greater extent, relative to the abstract words, whose associations are too sparse to support redintegration. This explains why an item concreteness effect occurs in immediate serial recall. However, as item redintegration restores the degraded trace of study items only at the individual item level, variables related to the meaning of these items, such as word concreteness, does not affect the retrieval of the order in which the items were presented. This explains why there is no order concreteness effect in immediate serial recall. Although the word/item concreteness effect has consistently been reported in previous memory studies, emotion words have almost always been treated as a type of abstract word. While Gorman (1961) did acknowledge that the concrete-abstract dimension should primarily refer to the denotative, but not affective aspects of meaning, she did not separate emotion words from the abstract words in her stimulus pool. This view was recently echoed in a normative study reported by Altarriba, Bauer, and Benvenuto (1999) who showed that concrete, abstract, and emotion words were rated in significantly different ways in terms of concreteness, imageability, and context availability. Using word stimuli from these norms in a free recall task (i.e. after separating out emotion words from abstract words), Altarriba

Concreteness and valence 93 and Bauer (2004) replicated the typical word concreteness effect but also found that emotion words were better recalled than both concrete and abstract words. Thus, they argued that the intermixing of abstract and emotion words in previous memory research might have underestimated a genuine word concreteness effect.' Similarly, while previous serial recall studies (e.g. Walker & Hulme, 1999) consistently reported the item concreteness effect, only one of them (Tse & Altarriba, 2007) filtered out emotion words from their abstract word pool. To our knowledge, no published study 2 has examined immediate serial recall for emotion words. To directly compare the serial recall of emotion words versus abstract words, in an unpublished study Tse and Altarriba (2005) separated emotion words from their concrete and abstract word pools by using Altarriba et al.'s (1999) norms in their immediate serial recall experiment. They replicated the item concreteness effect and found that participants recalled the emotion words better than the abstract words but worse than the concrete words. Contrary to the null effect reported by Walker and Hulme (1999), Tse and Altarriba (2005, see also Allen & Hulme, 2006) found a significant order concreteness effect, although their emotion words did not differ from concrete and abstract words in conditionalized order errors. However, because Tse and Altarriba's (2005) emotion words were more concrete than their abstract words (despite being less concrete than their concrete words), their item-recall findings can be easily explained by Hunlme et al.'s (1997) item redintegration account. That is, given that their emotion words tied between their concrete words and abstract words in their word concreteness, participants should redintegrate the emotion words better than the abstract words but worse than the concrete words. As a result, it is not surprising that their serial recall performance for emotion words was between those for concrete words and abstract words. Of course, for conditionalized order errors, Tse and Altarriba's (2005) order concreteness effect might not be easily explained by Huhne et al.'s account, but as demonstrated in the present study (and in previous research, such as Allen & Hulme, 2006, and Walker & Hulme, 1999), this effect has not consistently been found. To further examine the role of word concreteness in serial recall, as influenced by word valence, we orthogonally manipulated these two semantic variables in the present study. While emotion words are generally better remembered than neutral words (e.g. Kensinger & Corkin, 2003), the effect of word valence on memory in serial recall tasks has not yet been clarified. Some researchers reported no difference in free recall between positive and negative words (e.g. Doerksen & Shimamura, 2001). Others, in contrast, showed that positive words were better recalled than negative words (e.g. Hoosain & Salili, 1978; Phelps, LaBar, & Spencer, 1997). Moreover, research on the Pollyanna Principle (e.g. Boucher & Osgood, 1969) has

1Talmi and Moscovitch (2004) reported that while emotion words were better recalled than neutral words, memory was not enhanced for the emotion words relative to categorized word lists in a free recall task. Thus, they arguedthat it is the semantic relatedness of the emotion words that accounts for the better memory performance for emotion words, relative to neutral words, in a free recall task. However, the category chosen for their categorizedword lists in Experiment 3 (the one with the most stringentexperimental control across all of their reportedexperiments) was 'driving' It is difficult to ascertain whetheror interpreted with caution.

not the words associated to 'driving', which could be a very emotion-elicitingtask for some, would have provided for a stronger emotionalrepresentationfor those words, as compared to those intheir emotion word lists. Thus, theirresults may need to be 2While Buchner, Rothermund, Wentura, and Mehl (2004) did use emotion words in an immediate serial recall task, they treated these words as distractors because these authors were more interestedin the irrelevantspeech effect; rather than memory for emotion words.

94 Chi-Shing Tse andJeanette Altardiba

shown that pleasant information is typically processed more rapidly and more accurately, and is retained for longer periods of time than unpleasant information (e.g. Dember & Penwell, 1980; Matlin, Stang, Gawron, Freedman, & Derby, 1979; but see Osgood & Hoosain, 1983). But with very few exceptions (e.g. Bradley & Baddeley, 1990), the word concreteness of emotion words has not been explicitly controlled, so the effect of word valence in these studies could have been complicated by the uncontrolled effects of word concreteness. While Hulme et aL's (1997) item redintegration account could attribute the mnemonic superiority of emotion words over neutral words to the fact that participants' long-term knowledge for emotion words is semantically richer (e.g. containing more autobiographical and self-reference elements) than that for neutral words, whether it can also explain the effect of word valence on serial recall is not entirely clear. On the one hand, as negative words produce stronger stroop interference than neutral words (e.g. Sutton, Altarriba, Gianico, & Basnight-Brown, 2007), they should capture more attention than neutral and positive words at encoding. The extra attentional resource allocated to negative words could strengthen their encoding, facilitate their subsequent item redintegration at retrieval, and yield a stronger item concreteness effect, relative to those for positive and neutral words. On the other hand, the access to the long-term representations of negative words might be inhibited when participants try to retrieve them - a process analogous to the avoidance mechanism reported in attentional control studies (e.g. Mackintosh & Mathews, 2003). This inhibition might disrupt item redintegration and therefore greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the item concreteness effect for negative words (This line of reasoning will be more fully elaborated in the General discussion). In summary, the goal of our study is to examine the modulation of word valence (positive vs. negative) on the item (and order) concreteness effects in immediate serial recall for emotion words. We do not intend to demonstrate a general enhancement in memory for emotion-laden or emotion-label words over neutral words,perse,but rather we want to investigate the interactive effect of two semantic variables, word valence and word concreteness, on immediate serial recall so as to evaluate the boundary of Hulme et al's (1997) item redintegration account in explaining serial recall performance. In Experiment 1, we directly manipulated word valence and word concreteness. To foreshadow our results, we found an item concreteness effect only for positive words but not for negative words. Experiment 2 was conducted to replicate this novel finding, which to our knowledge, has not been reported in prior studies. We also included concrete and abstract neutral words as the baseline condition in this experiment to reveal how positive and negative word valence boosts or reduces the item concreteness effect, respectively, in immediate serial recall. As the procedures in our two experiments were so similar, we first present a general method and then separately report each set of results.

General method Participants Native English speaking undergraduates with normal or corrected-to-normal vision at the University at Albany, State University of New York, participated in exchange for partial course credit. None participated in both experiments. Data are reported from 20 and 40 participants in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively.

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95

Materials and design The experiment consisted of 21 (1 practice + 20 experimental) and 31 (1 practice + 30 experimental) study-test trials in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. In Experiment 1, five lists of concrete positive words, five lists of concrete negative words, five lists of abstract positive words, and five lists of abstract negative words were used as study lists in the 20 experimental trials. In Experiment 2, five lists of concrete neutral words and five lists of abstract neutral words, in addition to the 20 lists of emotion words used in Experiment 1, were used in the 30 experimental trials. To construct the 20 seven-item lists of emotion words for Experiments 1 and 2, we chose 70 positive and 70 negative words from Bradley and Lang's (1999) emotion word norms, with word valence (i.e. positive vs. negative) being operationally defined by their normed word valence ratings (see Table 1). Half of the positive and negative words were concrete and half, abstract, based on the concreteness ratings of Nelson, McEvoy, and Schreiber's (2004) norms. To construct the 10 seven-item lists of neutral words for Experiment 2, we chose 35 concrete words and 35 abstract words from Altarriba et al.'s (1999) norms as they separated emotion words from their concrete and abstract words according to the normed ratings of concreteness, imageability, and context availability. The items on each list were presented in a freshly randomized order for each participant (see Appendices A and B). Although the same sets of positive and negative words were used in Experiments 1 and 2, the list compositions of both word types were not the same in these two experiments. Five of these 30 lists represent one of the following six word types: concrete positive; concrete negative; concrete neutral; abstract positive; abstract negative; and abstract neutral. The study items of these six word types were matched on word length, word frequency, and number of syllables and of the four, emotion (i.e. non-neutral) words were matched on word arousal (all ps > .10 in independent sample t tests, see Table 1) (While the values of word valence and arousal Table I. Mean statistics for word stimuli in Experiments I and 2 Variable Log HAL word frequency Word length Number of syllables Word
concreteness Word valence

Concrete positive 9.49 (l.17) 5.00 (0.91) 1.49 (0.56) 5.66 (0.98)
7.11 (0.68)

Concrete negative 9.42 (1.58) 5.11 (0.87) 1.49 (0.56) 5.88 (0.97)
3.22 (0.99)

Concrete neutral 9.35 (I.45) 5.26 (l.29) 1.51 (0.51) 5.96 (0.44)
6.00 (l.10)

Abstract positive 9.53 (1.02) 5.06 (0.80) 1.40 (0.50) 3.44 (1.10)
7.00 (0.63)

Abstract negative 9.30 (l.63) 5.17 (0.79) 1.51 (0.51) 3.45 (1.04)
3.20 (1.01)

Abstract neutral 9.45 (1.71) 5.29 (1.34) 1.54 (0.51) 3.29 (0.50)
6.00 (l.36)

Word arousal

5.18 (0.92)

5.32 (1.00)

4.58 (0.90)

5.15 (0.89)

5.29 (I .07)

5.23 (0.88)

Note. The values in parentheses are standard deviations. The log HAL word frequency is from Balota et al. (2007). The emotion words were chosen from Bradley and Lang's (1999) norms. The neutral words were chosen from Altarriba et al. (1999). The word concreteness ratings (out of 7.0), N = 34, 34,33,31,35, and 30 for concrete positive, concrete negative, concrete neutral, abstract positive, abstract negative, and abstract neutral words were based on Nelson et al.'s (2004) norms. The word valence and arousal ratings (out of 8.0), N = 35, 35, 9, 35, 35, and 7 for concrete positive, concrete negative, concrete neutral, abstract positive, abstract negative, and abstract neutral words were based on Bradley and Lang's norms (see also footnote 3). Unless otherwise specified, all means and standard deviations are based on 35 observations.

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of concrete neutral and abstract neutral words are also listed in Table 1, these values could not be directly compared with those of the other four emotion word types because fewer ratings were available for neutral words, eight on average, than for emotion words, 35 on average, in our stimuli). The concrete and abstract words differed significantly in their word concreteness for positive, negative, and neutral word lists and the positive and negative words differed significantly in their word valence for concrete and abstract word lists (allps < .05 in independent sample t tests, see Table 1). In both experiments, a fixed set of presentation order of the study lists was created, such that none of the lists of the same word type appeared on two consecutive study-test trials. This presentation order, together with the same one in reverse, was counterbalanced across participants. An extra seven-item list (plain,leopard, elbow,flask, loyaltj, table, and incident) was constructed for the practice trial. To test for any potential confound between semantic or phonological similarity and the word types (see Talmi & Moscovitch, 2004 for a discussion), we performed two additional analyses on our word stimuli. First, based on Nelson et aL's C2004) free association norms, we computed the associative strength for all possible pairwise combinations of study items within each study list of each word type in Experiments I and 2. The mean forward and backward associative strengths were negligible (all below .005) and not significantly different (all ps > .85 in independent sample t tests) among the four word types in Experiment I and among the six word types in Experiment 2, thereby ruling out any potential confound between word types and semantic similarity in our stimuli. Second, we used Colin Davis' Match Calculator (available on-line at http://www.pc.rhul. the to compute ac.uk/staff/c.davis/Utilities/MatchCalc/MatchCalculator.zip) orthographic/phonological similarity for all possible pahrwise combinations of study items within each study list of each word type in Experiments I and 2. None of the eight similarity measureswas different among the fourand sixword types in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively (allps > .54 in independent sample t tests), thereby minimizing any potential confound between word types and orthographic/phonological similarity in our stimuli.

Procedures A PC-compatible computer with E-Prime (Psychology Software Tools, Inc., Pittsburgh, USA; http://www.pstnet.com/eprime) was used to display stimuli and to collect data. All stimuli were visually presented in white on a black background at the centre of a screen. The sequence of events in the practice and experimental trials was as follows. First, participants were presented seven words in lowercase letters at the rate of 1 second (i.e. 1 word per second) with a 1 second inter-stimulus interval. They were instructed to remember the words and their presentation orders. Immediately after the seventh word was presented, they were asked to type, on the keyboard, the list of items in the same order as they had appeared. Their typed words were displayed on the screen. After the participants finished typing an answer, they pressed the ENTER key to proceed (We recorded the overall reaction time of our participants in Experiment 2. Because this covariate had no effect on the overall pattern of the following analyses, we do not consider it any further). Their previous answer disappeared and then the participants recalled the next one. This procedure prevented them from backtracking and changing their responses or filling in the missed position. \%hen the participants were unable to recall an item from a particular serial position, they were required to type XXX and press the ENTER key to continue. They were reminded of the serial position of the word they were

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97

recalling with a numeric label (e.g. third) presented on the screen throughout the task. Immediately after recalling the seventh word in each trial, participants received a digit identification filler task in which they decided whether or not two sequentially presented digits were identical. They received a visual warning signal when their responses -were slower than 750 milliseconds. This task lasted for about 30 seconds regardless of the number of trials they finished. We included this task because we wanted to lessen any potential proactive interference from the earlier trials on subsequent immediate serial recall performance. After this filler task, participants were given a self-paced break until they pressed the SPACEBAR to start the next trial. Data analyses Unless otherwise specified, the significance level is set at .05. Participants' performance was quantified by serial recall, the proportion of items correctly recalled in their serial positions, and conditionalized order errors, the number of correctly recalled words reported in incorrect serial positions divided by the number of correctly recalled words irrespective of their serial positions. Averaged across participants, the cell means for these two measures were submitted to 2 (Valence: positive or negative) X 2 (Concreteness: concrete or abstract) X 7 (Serial position) repeated measures ANOVAs in Experiment 1, and 3 (Valence: positive, negative, or neutral) X 2 (Concreteness) X 7 (Serial position) repeated measures ANOVAs in Experiment 2. For both experiments, participants' cell means and means averaged across concreteness and across valence are presented in Table 2, their test statistics in ANOVAs are summarized in Tables 3 and 4 and their serial position curves are depicted in Figure 1. As shown in Tables 3 and 4, we found some significant interactions associated with Serial position, but because the pattern of the concreteness X valence interaction did not systematically change across the seven serial positions, we did not consider these higher-order interactions for the sake of simplicity.

Results Experiment I The main effects of concreteness and valence for serial recall suggested that concrete words were better recalled than abstract words and positive words were better recalled than negative words (see Table 3 for test statistics). The concreteness X valence interaction was also significant for serial recall and conditionalized order errors. Both item concreteness and order concreteness effects occurred for positive words [53 vs. 42%, t(19) = 3.77 and 16 vs. 25%, t(19) = 2.39, respectively], but not for negative words [42 vs. 41%, t(19) = 0.53 and 23 vs. 24%, t(19) = 0.27, respectively]. The item valence and order valence effects (i.e. positive words are better recalled than negative words) occurred for concrete words [53 vs. 42%, t(19) = 5.39 and 16 vs. 23%, t(19) = 2.44, respectively], but not for abstract words [42 vs. 41%, t(19) = 0.39 and 25 vs. 24%, t(19)= 0.19, respectively]. Experiment 2 The main effect of concreteness for serial recall suggested that concrete words were better recalled than abstract words (see Table 3 for test statistics). The main effect of valence for serial recall suggested that positive and neutral words were better

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Chi-Shing Tse and JeanetteAltarriba

Table 2. Mean (M) and standard deviation (SD) of serial recall and conditionalized order errors in Experiments I and 2 Serial recall M Experiment I Concrete positive words Concrete negative words Abstract positive words Abstract negative words Mean for concrete words Mean for abstract words Mean for positive words Mean for negative words Experiment 2 Concrete positive words Concrete negative words Concrete neutral words Abstract positive words Abstract negative words Abstract neutral words Mean for concrete words Mean for abstract words Mean for positive words Mean for negative words Mean for neutral words SD M Conditionalized order errors SD

53 42 42 41 48 42 48 42 55 47 53 50 46 47 52 48 53 46 50

14 18 18 16 15 16 15 16 20 16 22 21 18 20 18 18 20 16 20

16 23 25 24 21 29 23 27 22 25 20 23 24 23 22 23 23 25 21

14 15 13 17 12 II 9 12 17 16 18 18 17 20 14 16 17 15 17

Note. The serial recall was the proportion of words recalled in their correct positions. The conditionalized order errors was the number of words recalled in the wrong serial position divided by the total number of words recalled independent of their serial positions. recalled than negative words, t(39) = 4.15 and 1(39) = 2.30, respectively, although there was no difference in serial recall between positive and neutral words, t(39) = 1.44. We found a marginally significant concreteness X valence interaction for serial recall (p = .075), but not for conditionalized order errors. The absence of the latter interaction is not due to insufficient statistical power because based on Cohen's d of .73 in Experiment 1, the power to detect a significant interaction was .93 with N = 40 in Experiment 2. To examine whether the present findings in serial recall replicated those we obtained in Experiment 1, we tested the modulation of word valence (positive vs. negative) on the item concreteness effect by submitting the serial recall data to a 2 (Valence: positive or negative) X 2 (Concreteness) X 7 (Serial position) repeated measures ANOVA (See Table 4). The significant concreteness X valence interaction showed that the item concreteness effect occurred for positive words [55 vs. 50%, t(39) = 2.89], but not for negative words [47 vs. 46%, 1(39) = 0.44]. The item valence effect was greater for concrete words [55 vs. 47%, t(39) = 4.83] than for abstract

words [50 vs. 46%, t(39) = 2.05]. Hence, we fully replicated Experiment l's item
concreteness effect and item valence effect when, as in Experiment 1, the positive and negative words were considered.

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99

Table 3. The ANOVA table for serial recall and conditionalized order errors in Experiments I and 2 Conditionalized order errors F 16.30* 1.92 1.32 5.26* 1.50 0.63 1.64 61.94* 2.17 0.63 0.22 1.58 1.00 1.64A MSE

Serial recall df Experiment I Serial position Concreteness Valence Concreteness X Valence Concreteness x Serial position Valence X Serial position Concreteness X Valence X Serial position Serial position Concreteness Valence Concreteness X Valence Concreteness X Serial position Valence x Serial position Concreteness x Valence x Serial position *p < .05; Ap <. 10. See Note in Table 2. F 105.49* 7.75* 11.05* 9.66* 2.41* 2.98* 2.48* 204.35* 12.21* 7.70* 2.68A 1.92 A 0.83 2.42* MSE

(6,114) (I, 19) (I, 19) (1,19) (6,114) (6,114) (6,114) (6,234) (1,39) (2,78) (2,78) (6,234) (12,468) (12,468)

0.07 0.07 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.07 0.05 0.07 0.05 0.03 0.03 0.02

0.10 0.16 0.10 0.03 0.09 0.07 0.06 0.11 0.12 0.17 0.10 0.07 0.07 0.06

Experiment 2 (Positive, negative, and neutral valences)

Note that the difference in item concreteness effects for positive versus negative words in this experiment (4%) was half as large as the one found in Experiment I (8%). To find out whether this 4 versus 8% difference was significant, we submitted Experiments 1 and 2's serial recall data to a 2 (Valence: positive or negative) X 2 (Concreteness) X 7 (Serial position) X 2 (Experiment: 1 or 2) mixed-factor ANOVA. Of greatest importance, the valence X concreteness X experiment interaction was not
significant, F(1, 58) = 1.81, MSE
-

0.03, p = .18, indicating that the 4 versus 8%

difference was not statistically significant. None of the main effects or other interactions associated with Experiment approached significance, all Fs < 2.03, ps > .06. To contrast the effects of word valence between positive words and neutral words and between negative words and neutral words, we submitted the serial recall data to a 2 (Valence: positive or neutral) X 2 (Concreteness) X 7 (Serial position) repeated measures ANOVA and a 2 (Valence: negative or neutral) X 2 (Concreteness) X 7 (Serial position) repeated measures ANOVA. The concreteness X valence interaction was significant for the comparison between neutral and negative words, but not for the one between neutral and positive words (See Table 4). These two interactions showed that although the significant item concreteness effect for neutral words [53 vs. 47%, t(39) - 2.91] was stronger than the non-significant item concreteness effect for negative words [47 vs. 46%, t(39) = 0.44], it was not different from the significant item concreteness effect for positive words [55 vs. 50%, t(39) 2.89]. That is, relative to the 'baseline' item concreteness effect produced by neutral words, negative valence reduced the effect but positive valence did not boost the effect in the immediate serial recall task.
-

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Chi-Shing Tse and Jeanete Altarriba

Table 4. The ANOVA table for follow-up analyses in Experiment 2 Serial recall

df
Experiment 2 (Only positive and negative valences) Serial position Concreteness Valence Concreteness x Valence Concreteness x Serial position Valence x Serial position Concreteness X Valence X Serial position Experiment 2 (Only neutral and negative valences) Serial position Concreteness Valence Concreteness x Valence Concreteness x Serial position Valence X Serial position Concreteness X Valence X Serial position Experiment 2 (Only neutral and positive valences) Serial position Concreteness Valence Concreteness x Valence Concreteness X Serial position Valence x Serial position Concreteness x Valence x Serial position *p < .05;
Ap

F
195.65* 4.75* 17.22* 4.59* 1.29 0.37 2.05^ 173.3 * 5.50* 5.27* 5.38* 1.88^ 0.87 4.10* 154.84* 20.33* 2.07 0.12 3.04* 1.19 1.20

MSE
0.05 0.05 0.06 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.02 0.06 0.06 0.08 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.02 0.07 0.05 0.07 0.01 0.03 0.03 0.02

(6.234) (1,39) (1,39) (1,39) (6,234) (6,234) (6,234) (6,234) (1,39) (1,39) (1,39) (6,234) (6,234) (6,234) (6,234) (1,39) (1,39) (1,39) (6,234) (6,234) (6,234)

<.10. See Note in Table 2.

Discussion
Item concreteness effect In Experiments 1 and 2, we found the item concreteness effect for positive words but not for negative words, indicating that both word concreteness and word valence affect serial recall for emotion words. This concreteness X valence interaction can shed light on Hulme et al.'s (1997) item redintegration account, which suggests that participants could enhance the retrieval of the study items by calling upon their long-term knowledge. Hence, the extensive association of concrete words with richer and more accessible long-term memory representations (cf. Paivio, 1986) facilitates item redintegration more than does the sparse association of abstract words. While the overall item concreteness effect, as qualified by the main effect of concreteness in our Experiments 1 and 2, was in line with the item redintegration account, the concreteness x valence interaction suggests that the ease of redintegrating concrete versus abstract words during immediate serial recall depends on word valence. The finding of equivalent item concreteness effects for positive and neutral words indicates

that item redintegration was not enhanced by positive words. This occurred even
though the positive words are likely to be more personally relevant than the neutral words, and the semantic richness of the positive words presumably facilitates item

Concreteness and valence

Experiment 1 - emotion words

101

Experiment 2- emotion words

100 80

100" 80,
0 ca

NPOS-CON
0 .POS-ABS

POS-CON .

NEG-CON NEG-ABS

" NEG-ABS

. NEG-CON

T 60 ra 40200

2 60)4020 0c0

7
Serial position

3 4 56 Serial position

Experiment 2- neutral words 100

U)

-o)

3 4 5 6 Serial position

Figure I. Serial position curves as a function of concreteness (concrete CON vs. abstract ABS) and valence (positive POS vs. negative NEG) for emotion words in Experiments I and 2 and as a function of concreteness for neutral words in Experiment 2.

redintegration and in turn boosts the item concreteness effect for positive words. Of course, this could also be due to our matching of associative strengths among study items from the positive, negative and neutral word lists (see Methods). Nonetheless, this latter explanation was unable to accommodate our critical finding that the item concreteness effect did not occur for negative words. To explain the absence of an item concreteness effect for negative words, we propose the addition of a process, akin to Mackintosh and Mathews' (2003) attentional avoidance mechanism, to Hulme et al.'s (1997) item redintegration account. According to Mackintosh and Mathews, the processing of valence cues in a visual search task can be interfered with when valence is relatively mild (e.g. a picture of an ambiguous ringlike figure described by a statement like 'they severed the finger to steal the ring'). The participants' visual attention may be diverted away from the mildly valenced cues (i.e. attentional avoidance) during the search task. However, avoidance of more intensely emotional stimuli (e.g. a picture with strong emotionally aroused graphics) is more difficult and hence attention may be diverted towards them. A similar effect was also reported by Maljkovic and Martini (2005) wherein positive images and scenes were processed at a constant rate as presented using a rapid serial visual presentation procedure preceding an old/new recognition task. For negative images, however, initial processing was slower, indicating some difficulty in processing the negative

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images as compared to positive and neutral ones. In the present study, our negative words may be similar to the mildly valenced cues in Mackintosh and Mathews and the negative scenes in Maljkovic and Martini. The attentional avoidance triggered by negative valence degrades the encoding of negative concrete and abstract words, interferes with access to their long-term representations, disrupts item redintegration, and therefore weakens the item concreteness effect for negative words. Hence, we found the item concreteness effect only for positive and neutral words, but not for negative words, and this effect occurred even when the associative strengths among the study items were matched across these word types. This attentional avoidance account may predict that more intensely emotional word stimuli, such as taboo words, should enbance,rather than disrupt,item redintegration and thus boost the item concreteness effect. This speculation should be verified in future research. Apart from embedding the attentional avoidance mechanism within Hulme et al.'s (1997) item redintegration account to explain the current results, it is also possible that, as some researchers suggest, there is more than one type of item redintegration at work (e.g. lexical vs. phonological in Schweickert, 1993; phonological vs. semantic in Walker & Hulme, 1999). Thus, word concreteness and word valence could also influence different types3 of item redintegration. This possibility remains to be determined in future studies. Order concreteness effects As in prior studies, the evidence for the order concreteness effect is also mixed in the present study. While Walker and Hulme (1999) did not find an order concreteness effect, Tse and Altarriba (2005) and Allen and Hulme (2006) found a significant order concreteness effect. In the present experiments, we obtained the effect in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2. With twice as many participants in Experiment 2 as in Experiment 1, the power to detect the significant effect in Experiment 2 was very high (.93), so we believe that the null effect we obtained in Experiment 2 was not due to insufficient statistical power. The lack of reliability for the order concreteness effect across our two experiments seems to be consistent with the pattern reported in previous studies. Hence, even though the occasional presence of an order concreteness effect may contradict Hulme et at.'s (1997) item redintegration account, its unreliability might weaken its power to provide evidence against the account, which gives a quite satisfactory explanation for the item concreteness effect in immediate serial recall. Salience of emotion words in immediate serial recall Tse and Altarriba (2005) replicated and extended Altarriba and Bauer's (2004) findings in that emotion words were better recalled than abstract words in an immediate serial recall task. Though tangential to our main goal (i.e. a test for Hulme et al.'s, 1997, item redintegration account), the present study could also reveal whether Tse and
3

One could argue that the pattern of our concreteness x valence interaction was 'inconsistent' across the two experiments because while the effect of word valence forabstract words was nonexistentin Experiment I, it was present, albeit of asmaller magnitude than the effect for concretewords, in Experiment 2 However, the 'inconsistency' in this part ofour findings does not imply that our modifted Hulme et al's (1997) item redintegrationaccount is unreasonablebecause the basis of our interpretation is the finding that the word concreteness effect occurs for positive words but not for negative words. We consistently found this in our two experiments.

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Altarriba's finding can be solely attributed to the word-concreteness difference in their emotion and abstract words. The answer is 'no'. We obtained the item concreteness effect for positive words, but not for negative words, indicating that both word concreteness and word valence should be considered when explaining serial recall for emotion words. Unlike the present study in which word valence was manipulated between lists, Tse and Altarriba did not directly manipulate word valence and intermixed the positive and negative words in their emotion word lists. Hence, the effect of word valence could not be revealed in their study.4 While we recognize that quite often, negative words are generally better remembered than neutral words (e.g. Bock, 1986), it is not uncommon to find that responses to positive words are not different than those to neutral words (see e.g. Dewhurst & Parry, 2000). This latter finding appeared to hold true for the current study (see Table 4). However, the failure to find a memory enhancement effect for negative versus neutral items overall could have been a by-product of the type of task used in the current demonstration. For example, Bock provided participants with lists of positive, negative, and neutral emotion words and asked them to perform two orienting tasks with these words - pronounceability ratings and intensity ratings. Participants were then asked to recall as many of these words as possible. Results indicated that affectively arousing stimuli, both negative and positive, were better recalled as compared to neutral stimuli. The author argued that recall was a function of the conceptual processing of these tasks in the form of evaluative judgments within the orienting tasks that preceded recall. However, as no previous studies have manipulated word type in a manner similar to the current study (i.e. employing an immediate serial recall task with or without the use of any type of orienting task), it is difficult to speculate as to why the findings emerged as they did for negative versus neutral items. These general effects deserve closer examination in future studies. The interactive effect of word valence and word concreteness in immediate serial recall also sheds light on the apparent conflict in prior studies. That word valence affected memory performance in some (e.g. Hoosain & Salili, 1978; Phelps et al., 1997) but not in other studies (e.g. Doerksen & Shimamura, 2001) might be due to potential confounds in word concreteness in their stimuli. After controlling word concreteness, Bradley and Baddeley (1990) found better performance for positive words than for negative words in a free recall task. The present study not only replicated this finding in immediate serial recall (i.e. main effect of word valence - positive vs. negative), but also showed a greater item valence effect for concrete words than for abstract words. One possible explanation for these effects is the fact that concrete words possess a heightened degree of mental imagery as compared to abstract words (see e.g. Paivio, 1986). As such, it is possible that the influence of valence and that of imagery were additive in the case of concrete words and served to further accentuate the differences between positive and negative words. Thus, a word that was positive, concrete, and highly imageable ultimately led to better recall in the present case, as compared to a negative, concrete word whose image may have actually motivated a desire to avoid or otherwise divert attention away from the word itself. For example, in work conducted by Bywaters, Andrade, and Turpin (2004), participants were asked to rate a series of

4 it is possible to compare the findings in the two studies by averagingthe data across concrete positive and concrete negative

words in Experiment 2. By doing so, we found that concrete emotion words were significantly better recalled than abstract neutral words [51 vs. 47%, t(39) = 2.46], thereby replicating Tse and Altarriba's(2005) findings.

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pictures that varied on valence and arousal. Ratings were gathered on the pictures' valence, emotionality, and arousal. A subsequent recall task revealed that for moderately arousing stimuli, participants were much more likely to produce accurate descriptions of the images they had previously seen for positive images as compared to negative images. Thus, although both sets of pictures were equated on the basis of their arousal, positive stimuli were much better recalled than negative stimuli, over time. Ultimately, in order to resolve the conflict in prior studies, it is necessary to test whether the concreteness x valence interaction could be generalized to other memory tasks, such as episodic recognition, in future research.

Inconsistency with Monnier and Syssau (2008) After we completed our data collection, we noticed a recently published paper (Monnier & Syssau, 2008) that examined the effect of word pleasantness on serial recall. They found that participants recalled better and made fewer conditionalized order errors for pleasant words than for neutral words. As reported by the authors, their pleasant and neutral French words were matched on word concreteness (4.44 and 4.70, respectively). Because their word concreteness was rated on a five-point scale in the French word norms they cited, it is more appropriate to compare their pleasant and neutral words with our concrete positive and concrete neutral words, respectively. However, we did not replicate their findings: concrete positive words (55%) were only numerically better recalled than concrete neutral words (53%), t(39) = 0.78, and the conditionalized order errors were even numerically higher for concrete positive words (22%) than for concrete neutral words (20%), t(39) = 0.76. The absence of these effects is unlikely due to insufficient statistical power because based on Cohen's d of 1.47 in their Experiment 1 (where their materials were reportedly matched on word concreteness), the power to detect a significant 'word pleasantness' effect was .99 with N = 40 in our Experiment 2. There are a number of methodological differences between the two studies that could cause this discrepancy. While Monnier and Syssau presented the study items auditorily and repeated the same set of 10 pleasant and 10 neutral study items across study-test trials in their Experiment 1, we presented the study items visually and never repeated the same item across study-test trials. Another difference is that we included negative (or unpleasant) words in our study, but they did not. Future research should try to tease apart these differences and find out why the word pleasantness effect was reduced to be non-significant in the present study.

Item selection problem Before concluding the current paper, it may be important to rule out a potential concern pertinent to our item selection. Even though the overall word concreteness ratings were higher for concrete negative words than for abstract negative words (see Table 1), one could still argue that because some of our abstract negative words, such as crime and demon, seem to be quite concrete (see Appendixes A and B), the absence of an item concreteness effect for the negative words might be an artefact of our stimuli. To test this possibility, we evaluated whether or not our findings were affected by the presence of a few 'relatively concrete' abstract negative words by collapsing serial recall across 20 or 40 participants, and analysing the data based on our word lists corresponding to the four or six different word types in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively (As we randomized the presentation order of study items of these lists for each participant, we had to

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collapse the data across serial positions in the following list-based analyses in order to avoid an uneven number of observations across different serial positions. However, this renders us unable to report the conditionalized order errors in these analyses). As listed in Appendixes A and B, serial recall was very similar across the five study fists within each of the four (or six) word types, suggesting that our findings were not artifactual based on our stimuli. Hence, despite a few relatively concrete words in our abstract negative lists, the additional analyses clearly showed that the overall pattern had not 5 been compromised by our item selection.

Conclusion To our knowledge, the present experiments are the first to demonstrate a concreteness X valence interaction for emotion words in an immediate serial recall task. We replicated Walker and Hulme's (1999, see also Tse & Altarriba, 2005) item concreteness effect and further specified that this effect occurred for positive words but not for negative words. These results indicate that word valence can modulate immediate serial recall performance above and beyond the influence of word concreteness. Hulme et al's (1997) item redintegration account might explain the current findings by assuming that an attentional avoidance mechanism is in operation when participants try to retrieve negative words. Whether the interactive effect between word valence and word concreteness could also occur in other memory paradigms, such as working memory tasks and sequential learning paradigms, such as serial reaction time tasks, should be further investigated in future studies. Future memory researchers should keep in mind the potential effect of word valence on item concreteness effects as they construct their word stimuli when investigating the effects of word valence and/or concreteness in their immediate serial recall experiments.

Acknowledgements We thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and Rebekah Feinman and Jessica Peressini for their assistance with data collection.

According to Coltheart (1981), the word imageability ratings (ranged from 100 to 700) were 590, 572, 576, 450, 452,

and 410 for our concrete positive, concrete negative, concrete neutral, abstract positive, abstract negative, and abstract neutral words, respectively, with Ns of 35, 35, 31, 35, 35, and 32, respectively. The values uf word imageability for our concrete and abstract words were matched across word valence (positive, negative, and neutral), except that the abstract neutral words were less imageable than the abstractpositive and abstract negative words. Given that (a) word concreteness was statistically matched across positive, negative, and neutral abstractwords and (b) high imageable words are better recalled than low imageable words (e.g. Walker & Hulme, 1999), one would expect that serial recall performance for the abstractneutral words should be poorer than for the abstractpositive and abstractnegative words. However, in Experiment 2, the serial recall performance for abstractneutral words (47%) was indeed not different from those for abstractnegative words [46%, t(39) = 0.55] and for abstractpositive words [50%, t(39) = 1.28]. This suggests that the word-imageability confound might not be large enough to significantly affect serial recall performance. To further address this problem, we took out the two abstractneutral word lists (Lists 4 and 5) that had the lowest word imageability ratings and re-analysedthe data (All of the variables in Table I were still matched between this subset of abstractneutral words and the other five word types). The serial recall for the abstractneutral words was improved by only 0.9% (i.e. 47.7%, which was still not statistically different from those for abstractpositive and abstractnegative words). More importantly, this subset of abstract neutral words yielded ANOVA findings that were not different from those we stated in Tables 3 and 4; that is, the previous significant Fs remain significant the previous marginally significant Fs remain marginally significant and the previous nonsignificant Fs remain non-significant In short; our conclusion did not change after we took into consideration the fact that the abstract neutral words are slightly less imageable than the abstract positive and abstract negative words.

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Appendix A Word Stimuli for experimental trials in Experiment 1

List Concrete positive Palace Infant Dollar Candy King Comedy Dove 54 Pretty Friend Flower Yacht Kiss Snow Gold 52 Leader Priest Sunset Ocean Baby Cash Star 51 Circus Nature River Sugar Foam Dawn Coin 54 Breast Dinner Earth Color Bird Flag Frog 53 Concrete negative Morgue Beggar Python Slave Beast Jail Sour 41 Prison Bullet Insect Thief Skull Lice Cane 41 Corpse Spider Cellar Devil Board Bum Lump 40 Injury Needle Victim Flood Paper Tomb Dirt 45 Robber Weapon Poison Snake Dead Fire Army 42 Abstract positive Blue Spirit Health Glory Charm Pride Wish 42 Warmth Salute Virtue Taste Quick Idea Hope 41 Breeze Custom Gender Angel Swift Soft Gift 40 Bright Heaven Truth Proud Brave Easy Doll 43 Gentle Nectar Happy Alert Dream Wise Joke 44 Abstract negative Hatred Menace Clumsy Grief Alone Greed Cell 39 Afraid Deceit Excuse Black Agony Tense Slow 42 Malice Broken Vanity Upset Crime Hurt Cold 41 Crisis Frigid Errand Demon Panic Dark Lazy 40 Brutal Hungry Death Anger Fault Ugly Hard 43

% Serial recall 2

%Serial recall 3

%Serial recall 4

% Serial recall 5

% Serial recall

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Appendix B

Word stimuli for experimental trials in Experiment 2 List Concrete positive Baby Circus Dinner Flower King Ocean Snow 56 Bird Coin Comedy Foam Infant Palace Star 55 Breast Color Dollar Frog Kiss Priest Sugar 57 Candy Dove Earth Friend Leader River Sunset 54 Cash Dawn Flag Gold Nature Pretty Yacht 54 Concrete negative Army Burn Devil Insect Needle Robber Spider 45 Beast Cane Dirt Jail Paper Skull Thief 49 Beggar Cellar Fire Lice Poison Slave Tomb 48 Board Corpse Flood Lump Prison Snake Victim 46 Bullet Dead Injury Morgue Python Sour Weapon 45 Concrete neutral Acre Basket Costume Machine Knob Nose Pond 56 Airplane Bead Daughter Garden Liquor Orange School 53 Castle Bible Dentist Girl Moon Penny Salt 5o Balloon Cake Dust Hair Brush Game Text 55 Bank Cigar Face Jungle Street Pepper Timber 52 Abstract positive Angel Bright Easy Health Joke Salute Truth 51 Alert Charm Gender Heaven Nectar Soft Virtue 53 Blue Custom Gentle Happy Pride Spirit Warmth 47 Brave Doll Gift Hope Proud Swift Wise 48 Breeze Dream Glory Idea Quick Taste Wish 53 Abstract negative Afraid Broken Crime Demon Greed Hurt Slow 47 Agony Brutal Crisis Errand Grief Lazy Tense 45 Alone Cell Dark Excuse Hard Malice Ugly 45 Anger Clumsy Death Fault Hatred Menace Upset 46 Black Cold Deceit Frigid Hungry Panic Vanity 48 Abstract neutral Advice Dare Beauty Height Mind Quench Travel 46 Area Decay Finish Hunger Need Rich Vice 48 Chaos East Grace Learning Facility Sale Wealth 49 Cost Entry Fiction Legend Obey Stubborn Welfare 46 Culture Fact Hint Lift Oral Time Wisdom 45

% Serial recall 2

% Serial recall 3

% Serial recall 4

% Serial recall 5

% Serial recall

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TITLE: The word concreteness effect occurs for positive, but not negative, emotion words in immediate serial recall SOURCE: Br J Psychol 100 pt1 F 2009 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.