Pornography Use and Recall of Sexual and Neutral Words
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined the relationship between pornography use and memory for sexual and neutral words. One hundred and five undergraduates read two mixed lists of 13 sexual and 13 neutral words and were tested for recall. They also completed a questionnaire measuring how frequently they read or watched pornography, the Eysenck Personality Inventory measuring extraversion and faking, and a questionnaire measuring sex anxiety. Participants correctly remembered more sexual words than neutral words. There was no relationship between pornography use and recall of neutral words, but participants who reported that they accessed pornography recalled more sexual words than those who reported that they never did. It is argued that users of pornography are more interested in sexual words than non-users and may process the words more deeply. ********** Researchers have demonstrated that memory performance is a function of many factors, one of which is the nature of the material to be remembered. For example, many studies have demonstrated that visual material is better remembered than non-visual material, whether the comparison is between pictures and words or between concrete and abstract words (Paivio, 1971). Another characteristic of the material is its emotionality, which generally enhances memory performance (Kensinger & Corkin, 2003). Bradley, Greenwald, Petry, and Lang (1992) found that recall was higher for pictures that were more emotional (e.g., aimed pistol, burn victim, nude woman) than for those that were less emotional (e.g., trash can, hair dryer, old woman). Emotionality itself has been organized into two dimensions (Kensinger & Corkin, 2003): arousal, which refers to whether the content is or calming and valence, which refers to whether the content is positive or negative (pleasant or unpleasant). Both factors have been shown to influence memory (Ihssen & Keil, 2004; Kensinger & Corkin, 2003). In particular, Bradley et al. found that recall of pictures increased linearly with arousal but followed a quadratic function with valence, where memory performance was better for unpleasant and for pleasant pictures than for neutral pictures. Although emotionality is perhaps easiest to manipulate with pictures, which can provide vivid images, investigators have also studied the effect of emotionality on memory for words. Kensinger and Corkin (2003) found that recognition memory accuracy was higher for words that were low in valence and high in arousal (negative exciting words) than for a variety of neutral words. To discriminate between valence and arousal, they conducted a second experiment with negative words that were low in valence but low in arousal (e.g., sorrow) and words that were not as low in valence but high in arousal (e.g., sex words or swear words). To control for the fact that taboo words and negative words each share a dominant feature, the neutral words were less varied than in the first experiment. Each neutral word was an associate of either think or mind. Recall and recognition accuracy were both higher for taboo words than for negative words and higher for negative words than for neutral words. Kensinger and Corkin concluded that both valence and arousal contributed to the emotion enhancement effect on memory, but the effect of arousal was greater. Other investigators have also examined memory for taboo words, particularly those that are explicitly sexual. MacKay, Shafto, Taylor, Marian, Abrams, and Dyer (2004) found that both incidental and intentional recall were higher for taboo words that were mostly sexual (e.g., fuck, cock, dildo) than neutral words from a variety of categories (e.g., wrist, snack, pasta) or neutral words from a single category (animal names). In addition, Bush and Geer (2001) studied cued recall for sexual words (e.g., fellatio, cum), negative emotional words (e.g., fight, injure), and neutral words from a variety of categories (e. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".