ENCODING AND RETRIEVAL OF AMBIGUOUS AND UNAMBIGUOUS INFORMATION BY AGGRESSIVE AND NONAGGRESSIVE ELEMENTARY BOYS

We investigated the effect of sentence ambiguity on the recall and recognition of story information by aggressive and nonaggressive boys, with a particular focus on determining whether aggressive childrenʹs oftreported "hostile attribution bias" (Nasby. Hayden. & DePaulo, 1979) and generalized aggression schema Influences primarily the encoding or retrieval of ambiguous Information. Twenty-seven aggressive boys In Grades 3 through 5 were paired In a yoked design with 27 nonaggressive boys. Participants listened to a story that presented potential for an aggressive interpretation. Encoding of information was measured by a recognition test. Retrieval was measured by free recall. Whereas aggressive boys recalled approximately equal proportions of ambiguous and unambiguous information, the nonaggressive boys recalled more unambiguous than ambiguous Information. The recognition data revealed no group differences In recognition of ambiguous and unambiguous sentences. However, whereas the control group recognized approximately equal proportions of aggressively slanted versus nonslanted Items, the aggressive boys were significantly better at recognizing the aggressively slanted Items.