The Effects of Emotionality on Concept Formation

The effects of three levels of cognitive tuning (transmission, reception, and no-set) on the free recall of clustered and unclustered word lists were investigated with the use of three ratio measures: proportion of words correctly recalled, number of runs of clusters out of the number of possible runs, and number of clusters utilized over the number of words recalled. Subjects included 99 female undergraduates enrolled in an introductory psychology course. The results supported a cognitive structure as opposed to a motivational interpretation of the tuning set phenomenon. Receivers, being tuned for sorting information into broad categories, recalled a greater number of words, scored lower on the ratio of runs, and used smaller ratios of clusters to words than transmitters who tuned in cognitive structures designed to process discrete bits of information.