| Abstract: | Previous research suggests that people process pleasant information more efficiently than unpleasant information. This phenomenon has been illustrated in a variety of contexts and paradigms, and is frequently referred to as the Pollyanna principle. One important aspect of the Pollyanna principle is that people tend to retrieve pleasant members of a category from semantic memory prior to unpleasant members of the same category. However, we propose that the retrieval advantage of favourably viewed category members holds only for positive categories and that prototypicality of category members might be a better predictor of ease of retrieval than favourability. These possibilities were tested in two studies. In Study 1, favourability effects on retrieval order were observed for positive categories but not for neutral or negative categories. In Study 2, prototypical category members were retrieved before less prototypical category members for both positive and negative categories. These results suggest that the Pollyanna principle might be the result of a confound between favourability and prototypicality for members of favourable categories. |
