From the known sex differences in personality functioning it was hypothesized that males would recall more active words (Osgood's Semantic Differential) while females would recall more passive words than males. Two verbal recall techniques, an associative clustering and proactive task, confirmed the latter portion of the preceding hypothesis: on both tasks females recalled more passive words than males (ns = 44 and 60 in two experiments). Apparently a significant cognitive difference exists between the sexes in the organization and storage of passive but not active words.
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