Motivated forgetting mediated by implicit verbal chaining: a laboratory analog of repression

After learning an A-B paired-associates list, college students read a list of D words, several of which were consistently accompanied by unavoidable electric shock. The D words were members of implicit B-C, C-D chains, inferred from published word-association norms. In a subsequent recall test of the original A-B list, the B words that were implicitly associated with the shocked D words were forgotten significantly more often than control words.