Effect of Affective Content and Gender Type on Explicit and Implicit Memory

The goal of the present study was to investigate the effect of gender and emotional content on the function of explicit and implicit memory. This study was conducted on 90 undergraduate engineering students using random cluster sampling. Texts with positive, negative and neutral content were used as tasks of implicit memory. Participants were timed while reading passages aloud as quickly as possible, but not so quickly that they could not understand. The Explicit tasks were administered at the end of implicit memory testing, and consisted of multiple choice questions (recognition) regarding the passages. In both explicit and implicit memories the highest performance in the male group was related to positive tasks. However, females performed generally better than males in explicit memory. An additional finding was related to the speed of reading, in which women performed better than all other groups in neutral texts. The functions of explicit and implicit memories in both genders were different with regard to the tasks. For both memories, men and women showed the highest performance in positive and negative tasks respectively.