University of Utah Undergraduate Research Abstracts, Volume 4, Spring 2004

Listener Effects on Insight Gained from Autobiographical Remembering

LISTENER EFFECTS ON INSIGHT GAINED FROM AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMEMBERING Luke Hartley, Christopher Stevens, (Monisha Pasupathi) Department of Psychology, University of Utah This study examined one aspect of the social cognitive effects of listeners on meaning gained by a speaker in the sharing of a memory. In this study two experiments examined the relationship between listener effects on insight gained by a speaker during a conversation. We hypothesized that attentive listeners would result in more insight gained by the speaker, and that conversely inattentive listeners would result in decreased insight gained. In-sight was measured using a word analysis program that counted insight related language. The conversation was on the speaker's experience playing a video game in our lab just prior to the con-versation. Listeners were assigned to either attend to the speak-er as they normally would, or to count 'th' words spoken by the speaker thus providing a distracted condition. In the second and third studies a third condition was added where listeners were in-structed to be disagreeable with the story provided by the speak-er. The first experiment showed a significant difference in insight language used by the speaker between attentive and inattentive listener conditions thus confirming our hypotheses. The second experiment showed similar trends however not to a significant degree. These findings partially support a model of memory as including social effects on subsequent meaning gained from ones personal past. Luke Hanley Psychology Christopher Stevens Psychology Faculty Sponsor Monisha Pasupathi