Individual differences in story recall

Individual differences in story recall*

CSABA PLEH, ATTILA OLAH and TAMAS ZETENYI

Abstract

Expenmental dato, about the relationships between story recall andpersonalityare presented. Subjects were asked to read a short legendary tale under inci-dental or intentional study instructions. Recall followed half an hour laterand after six weeks. Psychometric dato on intelligence and 18 scalesfrom theCPI were used to predict recall

One general feature of the results was that relations between personalityand recall were Situation dependent Higher IQ subjects, for example, werebetter adapted -to the requirements of the task: after intentional studying,they recatted most from the inessential parts ofthe story, while after inciden-tal study they produced the greatest numbers of additions.

More reliable subjects usually produced fewer additions. The same wastrue for introverts with little self-respect. However, introverts, according tothe CPI dominance scale, produced relatively more additions compared to thenumber of facts recatted. These latter results suggest that Introversion, äs acognitive style, influences theprocess of encodingdecreasingspecificity, whileintro-extraversion is related to the recall attitudes äs well: in this respect,extraverts produce more post hoc additions.

Individual differences, both in encoding and in recall attitudes, affectindividual differences in recall in contrast to the unitary proposals found inthe literature.

The results of the experiments are discussed with reference to the issueof whether by using entirely verbal matenal, we can learn something aboutthe overall issue of the relationships between personality and memory. Thedata support the modest claim that some aspects of verbal self-reports about

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396 Csaba Fleh, Attila Olah and Tamas Zetenyi

social skttls and habits indeed seem to be related to behavior in real-life socialsituations.

Introduction

The issue of how our personality affects the way we remember things is ofnatural theoretical interest. In a certain basic sense the issue is circular. Onecan conceive of personality itself äs a complicated kind of stable proceduralmemory System, supplemented by an autobiographic episodic memory sys-tem. The issue then becomes a question of relationshipsbetweentherelativelyunchanging, more stable, memory System, and more flexible memory Systems.This paper presents memory relations in another type of quasi-circularityconnecte4 to personality. Methodically, what we know about individualdifferences (personality) and about memory is mainly derived from studiesbased on verbal data, such äs self-report questionnaires and recall of verbalmaterial. Since we are interested in individual differences of actual behaviorand in the recall of real life materials, our study will not overcome these basicdifficulties. Therefore, we shall also use self-report questionnaires and therecall of stories. However, our aim is to show first that self-report data indicatesomething about the way people behave in actual situations, and second, thatthe remembering of complex verbal material that relies on our social Schematacan be conceived äs a model of remembering real-life Information. Theexperimental model selected to study these questions is the recall of storiesäs a function of individual differences.

The question of individual differences has always played a central theo-retical role in the study of schematization processes in story memorization.This has been only natural since the Schemata approach t o story memory hasalways emphasized the importance of existing knowledge and the active roleof the mind in remembering. This active assimilative image of rememberingnaturally entails the influence of factors derived from the idiosyncratic as-pects of personal experience. One way in which the Ebbinghaus and Bartletttraditions of memory research can be contrasted (for others see Cofer, 1976)is to look at the respective weight each attributed to individual differences.For the followers of Ebbinghaus, the ideal experimental Situation involvedpresenting subjects with materials (e.g. nonsense syllables) which did notinteract with the subjects' previous knowledge, thus minimizing the role ofindividual differences in recall. For the followers of Bartlett, on the other

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individual differences in story recatt 397

hand, the exception is the rule in memorizing; people always tend to assimilatethe material, and general regularities must be looked for in the individualtransformations that appear in lifelike situations. General laws of memoriza-•tion were searched for in the first tradition, by the strictest possible exclusionof individual differences, while in the second, the greatest possible mobilizationof these effects is encouraged.

Although the approach of Bartlett and his followers treated the problemof individual differences in an organic way on the theoretical level, there havebeen few systematic empirical studies concerning this issue. Paradoxically,the empirical study of individual differences mostly followed the Ebbinghaustradition. A clear example of this is the abundance of memory research withinthe framework of extraversion-introversion theory, äs summarized by Eysenck(1977). There was a certain neutralism in the Bartlett tradition towardsindividual differences: it is enough to show that they are important, but, dueto their varied effects, little can be said of them in general.

The first attempts to overcome this limitation of perspective were connectedwith the problem of the effect on recall of ego involvement caused by thecontent of the text. Bartlett (1932) pointed out similar effects in connectionwith the recall of stories of events during the Great War which were influencedby personal war-time experience. Continuing in the same vein, Clark (1940)examined the effects of gender differences on the recall of stories in which afemale protagonist acted against traditional sex-typed behavioral stereotypes.He found that women tended to recall the story much more accurately thanmen who may have feit threatened by the content of the story and who,therefore, made it much more personal, recalling only its emotional tone.This research trend naturally converged with traditional topics of social psy-chology such äs the psychology of propaganda or rumor. Levine and Murphy(1943) found, for example, that the political attitude of readers was animportant selective factor in recall; and Allport and Post man (1945) in theirclassic study of rumor (introducing the concepts of levelling and sharpening)based their Interpretation on the serial reproduction of stories on a sociallyambiguous picture.

Although this content-oriented approach concerning the effects of personalfactors on recall continues up to'the present, another trend hasemerged whichconcentrates upon differences in the style of recall. These studies usually Startfrom a critical attitude: they point out that schematization äs a distortivetransformation of the original material might be a person-situation and text-dependent process rather than an unavoidableresult,as Bartlett (1932)implied.




Kintsch (1978: 75) has put the issue most clearly in modern terms: 'recallis reproductive, constructive, and reconstructive at the same time, and animportant problem is to determine ander what conditions one or the otherof these aspects predominate'. The study of individual differences from astructural point of view would mean the study of the role of personalityfactors in the determination of the ratio of reproduction, reconstruction andconstruction.

Research pertinent to this issue usually identified two characteristic stylesof remembering or recall. One is characterized by more precise, verbatim, butmore 'skeletonized' protocols, and the other by more additions, more freedomand more transformations in recall. Gomulicki (1956) has characterized thisdifference äs the predominance of omissions and transformations (para-phrases). Paul (1959) talks about a predominance of skeletonization andimportation äs the basic style difference in recall. He shows that the pre-dominance of these tendencies is a stable characteristic of his subjects: thosewho tend to 'import' much external material during recall of a story arecharacterized by less specific memory representation and more assimilationsto their own Schemata in other situations äs well (e.g. in recalling sentencesafter they made up stories from the m). At the same time, he demonstratesthat these importations are, at least partially, the result of active work duringunder Standing.

While coherence-increasing additions introduced by the experimenter intounfamiliar stories have generally improved recall, this modification of thematerial has not produced substantial changes in recall with subjects charac-terized by the stable importation tendency. The reason is that they have astrong spontaneous tendency to actively construct a causal chain in a story,performing similar additions by themselves during understanding.

These classical studies usually characterized recall types without trying torelate them to overall differences in personality. Some more recent studies,however, did make some moves in this direction, Eysenck (1976) found, forexample, that in situations emphasizing the need for exactness, highly activeintroverts were characterized by more distortions. Similarly, in immediaterecall of stories, Siklaki (1980) found that verbatim recall was more typicalof extraverts, while introverts tended to introduce more semantic change tothe material during recall. According to the interpretations given by Eysenck(1977), these effects are due to a weaker coding of the material in introverts.Using the terminology of Marton and Urbän (1964), elaborated for verballearning by Kulcsar (1977), we could also say that in remembering complex



Individual differences in story recall 399

meaningful material, extraverts are characterized by more specific coding andintroverts by less specific coding. Or, to put it in the terminology of con-temporary cognitive psychology, introverts might be characterized by moretop-down processing, by a stronger assimilative tendency, and a greater roleof expectations than extraverts, which would result in more additions.

In all these attempts towards a typology of recall styles, the analysis ofindividual differences remains unclear. Do additions and elaborations appearduring encoding, storage or retrieval (recall) in the more assimilative persons?The question sounds rather academic. However, a characteristic criticism ofthe Bartlett tradition has made it sharper. The critical study of Gauld andStephenson (1967) partially based the scepticism about the mnenonic natureof distortive schamatization on arguments from individual differences. Ac-cording to these authors, importations and distortions in the work of Bartlettand his followers are frequent only because their subjects showed a lenient,liberal attitude in recall. If we warn them to recall only what is really in thestory, their recall will be characterized by omissions much more than bydistortions. Further more - and this is the point of individual differences —those subjects who describe themselves äs more scrupulous tend to producefewer additions in recall. Thus, in contrast to the image implied by extra-version-introversion theory, in which differences would be evident in encod-ing, this approach suggests that individual differences mainly appear duringrecall. As Anderson and Bower (1973)generalizedonthebasisof these studies,the entire process of schematization, i.e. processes beyond encoding andstoring individual propositions, might well be interpreted äs the result of acoherence-producing editorial work during recall.

Starting from the paucity of actual research in this field and the declaredirnportance of individual differences in story recall, the authors made anattempt at an analysis of individual differences in story recall from a gcneraldescriptive standpoint. In our study, not a single chosen parameter of individ-ual differences was used, but a more exhaustive set of possible influencingtraits were employed. We were especially interested in the reproduction/construction ratios, and in the number of constructive additions äs a functionof reliability in self-report scales, äs well äs in the function of traits which arerelated to the social extraversion of the subjects.

With regard to the recall of specific parts of the text, we expected that theoverall scheme of the text would be equally encoded by each subject. Theeffects of individual differences could mainly be expected in the recall of lessimportant parts of the text; idiosyncrasies will show up where culture fails to



400 Csaba Pleh, Attüa Oläh and Tamäs Zetenyi

predict recall. Thus we expected, for example, that more intelligent subjectswould recall more of the unimportant parts of the text.

Since we varied both study instructions and recall time, it was possible toinvestigate some individual and situational determinant§ of recall within thesame study.

Method

Subjects and instructional groups

Our subjects were highly motivated high-school graduates participating in acompetitive College exam to enter the psychology program at our university.At the beginning of one of the examination sessions, subjects had to read ashort story with three different types of instructions. The first, intentionalgroup (n = 31: 7 males, 24 females) was asked to read the text in order to beable to recall in later; the other two groups had an incidental orienting task.However, in the rather formal Situation, they might also have had an inten-tional attitude to memorize, which could reduce between-group differences.In the scaling group, (n = 42:1 males, 35 females) the subjects were asked torate the story on semantic differential-like scales (interesting-uninteresting,conservative-progressive, etc.), while in the moral group they were asked tomake up a short moral for the story (n = 45: 8 males, 37 females). Subjectswere assigned to the groups onaquasi-randombasis: experimenters distributedthe sheets from mixed piles.

Recall situations

Thirty minutes after the completion of the five-mile reading/working on thestory, the subjects had to give a written recall of the story. The instruction,given in a written form to the subjects, emphasized both the need for äs manydetails äs possible, and the acceptability of paraphrases. Sixweekslater, duringanother session of the entrance examination procedure, another unexpectedrecall was solicited utilizing basically the same instructions.




The text and coding ofthe protocols

A Hungarian legendary tale from the collection edited by Hoppäl (1973) wasselected. The English translation of the tale is given in the Appendix. The textwas segmented in a quasi-propositional way, and recall protocols were codedfor content according to the propositional units, i.e. according to the recall ofthegist of eachunit.

Several overall indices were derived to characterize each protocol. Besidesthe number of units recalled, the length of the protocols and the number ofelaborative additions were also recorded. A special index coined confabulation(unit-addition unit) was intended to measure the relative strength of produc-tion to construction. The smaller its value, the more the relative importanceofthe additions.

Quotes, the number of direct speech quotations, is a possible indicator ofverbatim recall, since only the units which corresponded to actual dialogue inthe original were coded here. On the other hand, the number of generalizationsand particularizations (units where a predicate is extended over the two actorsinstead of one, or its validity is reduced to one actor instead of two) was usedfollowing Gauld and Stephenson (1967) äs an indicator of atendency towardsless specific or parasitically specific memory representation. Finally, therecall of units from the first, more abstract part of the story (units l to 19)was separately considered too, äs an indicator of the recall of the less im-portant episode; the one not leading to solutiori.

Personality traits used

After the subjects read and first recalled the story, several personality testswere administered to them. A rough measure of IQ was obtained usingEysenck's (1962) group intelligence test in a Hungarian version (Vekerdy,(1973).

A Hungarian adaptation of Gough's California Personality Inventory(Gough, 1957; Oläh, 1984) was also administered. The scales usually appliedwith respect to this inventory were all used, but only the ones shown to berelated to recall will be mentioned.



402 Csaba Pleh, Attila Olah and Tamas Zetenyi

Analyses of the data

Three sets of statistical analyses were performed on the material. First, acluster analysis was performed on each instruction by recall Situation usingall recall and personality variables.

As a second method, stepwise linear regressions were computed for eachSituation using units and additions äs dependent variables, and all the per-sonality measures äs predictors. Finally, quasi-experimental analyses ofvariance were computed, using each recall characteristic äs a dependentmeasure, and each personality variable äs a grouping variable. Three-waymodels were constructed with time-of-recall äs a within-subject factor, andinstructional group and personality trait äs a between subject factor. In orderto form this latter partition, three groups were formed along each trait. OneSD below the mean was the upper limit for the low group, one SD over themean was the lower limit for the high groups, all other subjects belonging tothe medium group. Thus, while grouping was post hoc, it was not arbitrary,or ad hoc. Only results from this latter set of analyses will be presented.These results are, however, in agreement with the analyses using the othermethods which are reported in detail in Pleh, Oläh and Zetenyi (1984). Inthe Anova tables, only the main effects of trait and its interactions will bepresented; instruction and time main effects will only be mentioned äsevident from our recent perspective.

Results and discussion

Intelligence and recall

The number of recalled units was only related to IQ among all the possibletrait s. A highly significant task time intelligence interaction was obtained(^4,109 =4.82, p <0.01). The meaning of this interaction, äs indicated bythe means in Table l, was that while, in incidental tasks, high intelligenceincreased recall only shortly after reading the text, in the group which wasgiven the most abstract instruction (MORAL), the positive effect of intelli-gence on recall remained after a longer time äs well.

This was especially true in connection with the recall of less importantparts of the text. A significant main effect of IQ on the recall of the abstract




Table 1. Effects oflQ on recatt ofthe story

Recalled Units

intentional

scaling

m oral

Abstract Parts

intentional

scaling

moral

Abstract, main

I.II.I.

II.I.

II.

I.II.I.

II.I.

II.

effect

LowIQ

242021172014

11.07.38.46.37.95.1

7.5

Medium IQ

241721151918

10.77.29.46.47.97.1

8.0

High IQ

271921172617

11.57.0

10.48.1

12.77.6

9.5

part was obtained (̂ 2,109 =3.34, p < 0,05), with low intelligent subjectsrecalling 7.5, and medium intelligent ones 8.0, while the ones with a highIQ recalled 9.5 units from this part of story. A significant triple interactionbetween IQ, instruction and time (F^\w = 2,72, p <0,05) indicated, how-ever, that this was only true in the incidental groups, and mainly in their firstrecall, äs the means in the lower part of Table l show. Finally, there was aninteraction between IQ and time with regard to additions (^2,109 = 3.36,p < 0.05). This could be interpreted in the following way: although wenaturally found a general tendency for additions to increase with time, thiswas more characteristic of intelligent subjects (5.7 and 7.4 additions in Istand 2nd recall) than of the other groups (6.2-7.2,7.4-7.4).

Thus, an expected higher recall of unimportant parts by highly intelligentsubjects was found. In intentional memory tasks this might be related toencoding efficiency, because after longer intervals the relationship disappears.Following incidental tasks, however, higher intelligence seems to produce aricher representation. This is supported both by a higher recall over longertime periods following such tasks and higher increase of additions — coherencemaking elaborations — with the lapse of time in intelligent subjects.

There was some indication in our data that, in incidental tasks, intelligence




might be related to higher adaptation to the demands of the task. Namely: itwas true in general that following the scaling task, the usually less recalledfirst part of the story was recalled better than in the other two groups.Among all possible traits in this group, intelligence was most clearly relatedto recall of the first part of the story, äs shown by a correlation of 0.50 in thecluster analyses. In other words, the main effect of IQ discussed above wasmost clear in the scaling task. In a similar way, the Moral group in general hadmore additions than the other groups, again due to the effects of the orientingtask. In this group, IQ had the highest correlation with the number of addi-tions: the more intelligent people showed a higher degree of adaptation tothe task.

Self-confidence, reliabüity and additions in recall

As Table 2 shows, the self-acceptance (SA) scale of the CPI questionnaire hada very clear relationship with the number of additions. The more sure subjectswere of themselves, the more additions they produced. This is evident, how-ever, only in the incidental groups, äs the upper part of the Table indicates.In these two groups, by far the most important determiner of additions wasself-acceptance among all the personality traits considered. For both groups,the first variable of the regression equations, which predict additions, wasself-acceptance, while, in the intentional group, this was not the case. In in-tentional memorization, lower levels of self-acceptance (confidence) actuallyled to more additions.

It is worth noting that if we consider the additions, and take into accountat which points in the story they appear, we see that the number of additionsin self-confldent people is quite high during second recall, when the Overallnumber of additions is much higher in general. Furthermore, the increase ofadditions in self-confldent people mainly appears at places where there arecritical gaps in the surface organization of the story (after the 5., 6., 17., 25.,31. and 37th units) - where usually there is a relatively higher number ofadditions in all subjects.

Thus, the tendency of more self-accepting, confident, extraverted peopleto make more additions does not lead to a distortion of accuracy. It does notappear when the task requires exactness, and if it appears, it does so in critical'good spots'. All of this suggests that the effects of self-acceptance are prob-ably more a result of recall attitudes than a simple memorization effect.



Individuell differences in story recall 405

Table 2. Effect of seif acceptance (CPI: Sa) on additions

Low Medium High FSelf-acceptance Self-acceptance Self-acceptance

IntentionalScalingMoral

AU

1146

6.8

458

6.2

87

11

8.3

F (4,109) = 3.90p < 0.005

F(2,109) = 3,18,p < 0.05

This Interpretation is also supported by the fact that the confabulationindicator, which relates the number of additions to the number of correctlyrecalled units, had no significant connections with self-acceptance. On theother hand, the scale of conventional reliability in the CPI questionnaire (CM)had a clear connection with the confabulatory tendency, äs Table 3 shows.This was clear, äs the interaction in the upper part of the table indicates, onlyfor the second recall. Conventionally reliable persons recalled relatively morethan they added to the story (remember that the higher the score, the lowerthe confabulation). This trait was also related to an indirect measure of theverbatim nature of recall: direct speech quotes, äs shown by the lower partsof Table 3, were recalled better by more reliable persons in the intentionalSituation.

Table 3. Confabulation (ratio of recall to additions) and conventionaltrustworthiness (CPI: CM scale)

Confabulation:

Main effect

Direct Speechin Dialogues:

: firstsecond

intentionalscalingmoral

Low CM

.60.26

.43

1.53.44.8

Medium CM

.66.48

.57

3.42.93.4

High CM

.76.69

.72

5.52.43.6

F

F < 1F (2,10:) =6.00,

p < 0.01Interaction :F(2,109) = 4.19,p < 0.02F (2,109) = 3.77p < 0.05

F (4,109) = 2.55,p < 0.05




The confabulation indicator also had a characteristic relationship with thedominance (Do) scale of the CPI. This relationship, however, was just thereverse of our expectations. As the upper part of Table 4 shows, dominantpersons, especially during second recall, tended to add less to the storycompared to the amount of their recall. Parallel with this, dominant personshave a stronger tendency to particularize the role of the participants in thestory, and less of a tendency to generalize.

Table 4. Effects of dominance (CPI: DO) on confabulation, generalization andparticularization

Lowdominance Medium DO High DO F

Confabulation: firstsecond

Generalizations(main effect)Particularizations(main effect)

.67

.34

.57

.16

.63

.47

.69

.17

.72

.66

.41

.36

F (2,109) = 4.01p < 0.02F (2,109) = 2.92,p < 0.06F (2,109) = 2.98,p < 0.05

The data summarized here are relevant to the issues of personality corre-lates to story recall mentioned in the introductory part of this paper in tworespects. First, our results that reliable persons recall relatively more comparedto the amount of additions is similar to the findings of Gauld and Stephenson(1967) in an interview concerning conscientiousness. People who declarethemselves to be more scrupulous, or who indicate this tendency in theiranswers to a questionnaire, are indeed more scrupulous in real life situationsalthough their ovcrall pcrformance level is not higher.

The results concerning self-acceptance and dominance äs personality traitscan be interpreted with reference to the relationshipsbetween story memoryand extraversion. These scales of the CPI usually form one factor, äs was alsothe case in a factor analysis performed on a larger Hungarian sample (Oläh,1984) — which roughly corresponds to the extraversion factor of Eysenck(1967) entailing the social extraversion, the actual social behavioral side ofthis trait.

In our study, the Dominance scale of the CPI acted indeed äs extraversiondid in other works; persons with lower dominance scale (i.e. more introvertedpersons) were characterized by more additions and generalizations. Thus,



Individual differences in story reeall 407

using the terminology of Marton and Urbän (1964) and Kulscsär (1977), theyhad shown the less specific coding pattern in introverts. Self-acceptance, how-ever, contradicted this picture. More extraverted people gave more additionsin incidental situations. In our view, however, this scale reflects more of a'laxity' which might be connected to reeall attitudes. That is why its relation-ship to additions is reversed, following intentional tasks. In our view, thistrait is related not to encoding differences, but to additions during reeall,while dominance might be related to non-specific coding. Of course, furtherevidence is needed to support this view. However, within the CPI questionnaireitself, it is clearly indicated that the two scales have an only partially over-lapping measurement domain.

While dominance had a slightly positive correlation (0.16) with conven-tional reliability (CM), self-acceptance had a -0.19 correlation. Thus, we sug-gest that while dominance measured in the CPI is related to transformationsduring encoding, self-acceptance is related to reeall attitudes and indirectly to'trustworthiness'.

Thus, we feel that in our study of individual differences in story reeall wehave obtained evidence using the same material suggesting that the issue isnot of an all or nothing type: there are characteristic individual differencesboth in encoding and in reeall attitudes. Variability of schematization is aresult of several independent factors, some of which are also clearly relatedto instructional set.

Concerning our starting points about the use of verbal methods to studynonverbal processes, the results give some hope. First, äs far äs self-reportverbal measures of personality are concerned, the analysis with certain CPIscales indicates that self-report measures, especially the ones having to dowith aspects of everyday social behavior, reveal something real about thepeople's behavior. They show some correlations with behavior in a socialSituation, namely the treatment of material in a highly strenuous examinationSituation. On the other hand, our data do not clearly teil us anything aboutthe way personal episodic memories in real life are treated. They go beyondthe verbal reeall of verbal material in one single respect: they indicate thatcomplex verbal material with a social content is treated with reference to theoverall social Schemata that the verbal material mobilizes (see Pleh, 1987).




Appendix

The actual text with the segmentation units applied

The Origins of Dishwashing

1. When God created Adam and Eve,2. Eve was very lazy.3. She didn't want t o do the dishes.4. Adam went to God.5. He said: 'My God, take Eve away from me,6. she doesn't want to do the dishes,7. She says that I should do the dishes,8. but this is the duty of woman.'9. God answered: 'All right, Adam, 11 take her for three days.'

10. Adam remained alone.11. The three days were long.12. He couldn't bear the loneliness.13. He went to God,14. and said 'My Lord, my creator, give Eve back to me!'15. God answered: 'Well, why did you come, to ask me to take Eve

from you,16. and now you ask for her back?17. 'My Lord, my creator, neither with her, nor without her1 - answered

Adam.18. 'AU right, U give her back,19. but don't come to complain to me any more' answered God.20. They were in peace for a week.21. After a week, they started to quarrel about dishwashing again.22. Adam didn't dare to go to God fo complain.23. They agreed upon not talking to each other,24. and the one to speak first would do the dishes.25. They didn't talk t o each other.26. Adam laid down on his back,27. and covered himself with a big leaf.28. Eve sät by his side,29. and on the other side sät the cat.30. There was silence.31. Suddenly Eve sees the leaf moving upwards a little bit.32. The leaf moved upwards again,33. and the cat prepared to jump.34. Eve was watching once the cat, once Adam, once the leaf.35. The third time the leaf raised a lot.36. The cat made a movement, prepared to jump.



Individuell differences in story recall 409

37. Eve told it to get away.38. Adam said: Ύου will do the dishes!'39. From then on, it's the women who have to do the dishes.

Note

Preparation on this paper was supported by grant No. 24-02-84 of the HungarianMinistery of Education to the flrst author. Correspondence should be addressed tothe first author, Department of General Psychology, ELTE, Budapest, Izabella u.46.1378 P.O Box 4, Hungary.

We would like to thank William Barrath who has been a great help in clarifyingour English.

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Hungarian). Magyar Pszichologiai Szemle 30: 657-662.

Csaba Pleh gained his Ph.D. in psychology in 1970, and an M.A. in linguistics in 1973from Eötvös University, Budapest. He is Associate Professor and Head of Department,of the Department of General Psychology, Eötvös University, Budapest, where he re-searches in psycholinguistics and discourse. His publications include: Pszicholingvisztikahorizontka. (The horizons of psycholinguistics.) Budapest 1980; A törtenestszerkezetes az emlekezeti semak. (Story structure and memory Schemata) Budapest, 1986.

A ttila Olah is an associate professor of the psychology of personality at Loränd EötvösUniversity, Budapest. He received his Ph.D. in the psychology of personality fromLorand Eötvös University. His recent research areas are anxiety, anger, coping behavior,cognition and emotion interaction.

Tamas Zetenyi is an associate professor of psychology at the Lorand Eötvös University.He received his Ph.D. in the psychology of creativity from L. Eötvös University. Hisrecent research interest is the application of fuzzy sets in psychology. He has just editeda volume/Fuzzy sets in psychology by North-Holland/ on that.



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Individual differences in story recall

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