I remember (and forget) your happy smiling face: Directed forgetting of emotionally expressive faces of in-group and out-group members.

In item-method directed forgetting, directed forgetting occurs when remember-cued items are better retained than forget-cued items, a result often attributable to the rehearsal of remember-cued items and cessation of rehearsal of forget-cued items. Such effects were found in Experiment 1 for happy White and Asian faces, but not when neutral and sad White or Asian faces were presented at study. These results were consistent with predictions from the affect-as-cognitive-feedback hypothesis, according to which positive stimuli promote task-relevant processing whereas negative stimuli stop or reverse those processes. Results of Experiment 2 suggest that Experiment 1 results are not easily attributed to dimensions associated with the photographs (e.g., attractiveness) used in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, recognition was examined for photographs of both Whites and Asians seen at study. Consistent with research on face recognition biases and the 'happy-face effect', more White than Asian faces and more happy than sad photographs were recognized at test. Directed forgetting was found when attention was directed to in-group or out-group faces but with increased task complexity or demands, stimulus attributes come to guide information processing. Suggestions for future studies are presented.