Die Hard in Notting Hill: Gender Differences in Recalling Contents from Action and Romantic Movies

We investigated the impact of movie genre preferences on memory for movie content. Starting from a well‐documented gender gap in movie preferences, we predicted that women would recall more contents from a romantic movie than from an action movie, whereas men were expected to recall more contents from an action movie than from a romantic movie. In two experiments, male and female participants watched 30‐minute clips from action and romantic movies and then answered 30 questions on movie content and additional questions. Both experiments showed that women recalled relatively more information from a romantic movie than from an action movie, whereas men showed the opposite pattern. Further analyses showed that these effects were independent from participants' familiarity with the movie and not mediated by participants' liking of a particular movie. In general, the results of our study provide further evidence for an effect of (gender‐related) interests on memory performance.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.