Gender differences in implicit and explicit memory for affective passages Leslie A. Burton, * Laura Rabin, Susan Bernstein Vardy, Jonathan Frohlich, Gwinne Wyatt, Diana Dimitri, Shimon Constante, and Elan Guterman Psychology Department, Fordham University, 441 E. Fordham Rd., Bronx, NY 10458, USA Accepted 12 February 2004 Abstract Thirty-two participants were administered 4 verbal tasks, an Implicit Affective Task, an Implicit Neutral Task, an Explicit Affective Task, and an Explicit Neutral Task. For the Implicit Tasks, participants were timed while reading passages aloud as quickly as possible, but not so quickly that they did not understand. A target verbal passage was repeated three times, and alternated with other previously unread passages. The Implicit Affective and Neutral passages had strong affective or neutral content, re- spectively. The Explicit Tasks were administered at the end of testing, and consisted of multiple choice questions regarding the passages. Priming effects in terms of more rapid reading speed for the target compared to non-target passages were seen for both the Implicit Affective Task and the Implicit Neutral Task. Overall reading speed was faster for the passages with neutral compared to affective content, consistent with studies of the emotional Stroop effect. For the Explicit memory tasks, overall performance was better on the items from the repeated passage, and on the Affective compared to Neutral Task. The male subjects showed greater priming for affective material than female subjects, and a greater gain than female subjects in explicit memory for affective compared to neutral material. Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Gender; Implicit memory; Explicit memory; Verbal priming 1. Introduction Several studies have reported gender differences in explicit verbal memory, such that female performance is better than male performance. This has been shown for word recall and recognition (i.e., Berenbaum, Baxter, Seidenberg, & Hermann, 1997; Herlitz, Nilsson, & Backman, 1997; Hultsch, Masson, & Small, 1991; Kra- mer, Delis, Kaplan, OÕDonnell, & Prifitera, 1997) as well as story recall (Hultsch et al., 1991). These verbal explicit memory findings occur in the absence of reports of gender differences in verbal prim- ing or procedural memory (Herlitz et al., 1997). Priming, a type of implicit memory, has been defined as ‘‘unin- tentional retrieval of previously acquired information on tests that do not require conscious or explicit recollec- tion of specific previous experiences’’ (Schacter, Cooper, Delaney, Peterson, & Tharan, 1991b). Verbal priming is usually assessed with word-stem or word-fragment completion tasks, in which a part of the word is given, and the influence of previously seen material on the subjectÕs completion behavior is evaluated (i.e., Graf, Squire, & Mandler, 1984; Tulving, Schacter, & Stark, 1982). Priming is dissociable from explicit memory, and is often intact in amnesic patients with explicit memory deficits (i.e., Cermak, Blackford, OÕConnor, & Bleich, 1988; Graf et al., 1984). A study relevant to the present one by Musen, Shimamura, and Squire (1990) reported intact verbal priming in amnesic patients. In their study, participants read 2 different passages 3 times, and im- proved reading speed was seen for both normal controls and the amnesic patients; the controls performed better than the amnesic subjects on questions about story content (explicit memory). * Corresponding author. E-mail address: burton@fordham.edu (L.A. Burton). 0278-2626/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2004.02.011 Brain and Cognition 54 (2004) 218–224 www.elsevier.com/locate/b&c