The effects of self-reference, self-relevance, and self involvement on recall and recognition of personality-trait information

The purposes of the present study were to investigate the effects of self-reference, congruency between self-cognition in introvert-extrovert dimension and presented items related to the dimension, i.e., self-relevance, and self-involvement on the recall and recognition. Nine introvert-and 12 extrovert-self cognition subjects (ISC and ESC) were given a judgement task where they were required to judge 44 introvert and extrovert items in one of the three ways of processing: structural, semantic, and self-referent. Then they were given surprise tests of a free recall and recognition, followed by self cognition rating and desirability ratings of recognition test items. Main results were as follows: (1) self-referent processing was significantly higher in recall and recognition than semantic processing only in extrovert items, (2) ESC showed significantly higher recognition for extrovert than introvert items, although no such a differential recognition was detected in ISC. (3) High self-involved items were more confidently recognized, and also it was suggested that the recognition pattern of the second result above appeared especially in the high self-involved items. These results were discussed in terms of attention allocation and self-evaluation.