Communicating about a social interaction: Effects on memory for protagonists’ statements and nonverbal behaviors

People’s communications about a social interaction they have observed can often decrease their memory for the protagonists’ statements and behaviors. The nature of this decrement depends on both the type of communication and the type of item to be remembered. Participants in three experiments observed a movie of an interaction with the objective of merely comprehending it. Later, they wrote their impressions of the characters involved or alternately described the sequence of events that occurred. Communicating impressions of the protagonists decreased recognition of the statements that protagonists made but had little effect on the recognition of nonverbal behaviors. However, describing the sequence of events that occurred decreased recognition of both statements and nonverbal behaviors. A visual reminder of protagonists’ behaviors increased recognition of both these behaviors and the statements that accompanied them, whereas an auditory reminder of protagonists’ statements decreased recognition of nonverbal behaviors. Results were conceptualized in terms of the different mental representations that people use as a basis for judgment and the processes that underlie their construction.