The study employed an experimental design over a 6 month period with 34 students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction.
The study employed an experimental design over a 12 week period with 26 students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction.
In the instructed group, participants were asked to form positive sentence and avoid the negative alternative in the emotional blocks.
However, WMC scores did predict the proportion of well-formed sentences (negative or positive) formed in the task (z = 3.8, p<0.001), both in the spontaneous (z = 3.5) and in the instructed group (z = 2.7).
A first group was simply told to form grammatically correct sentences, eliciting the spontaneous avoidance of the negative alternative (spontaneous group); a second group, in contrast, was explicitly instructed to avoid forming negative sentences (instructed group).
As anticipated, participants avoided negative sentences in the spontaneous group (25% negative sentences, logistic regression z = −11, p<0.001) as well as in the instructed group (0.5% negative sentences).
