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We should point out that although Soldat e t a1. (1997) demonstrated that the colors used did not affect current mood, other researchers have shown small color-related niood effects. For example, Jacobs and Blandino (1992) demonstrated that red led to less reported fatigue than yellow, hlue, green, and white. Furthermore, Jacobs and Suess (1975) demonstrated that red and yellow led to greater anxiety than did blue or green, and Wilson (1966) showed that red was more arousing than green. Although we chose particular colors for our study to remove the confound between item order and examination form color, it is important to note that colot may have other psychological effects in other situations. Thus, regardless of the colors chosen for different forms of examinations, the potentialexisrs for color effectson performance-a possibility apparently not recognized by many instructors.Our results have an important implication for test situations. That is, instructors should not he cavalier about colot codingdifferent forms ofexaminations. In fact, we believe that it would be best if instructors did not use color-coded forms.

Recentarticles in Teaching of Psychology have endorsed the classroom use of various mnemonic techniques. Yet a degree of mnemonophobia (i.e. , fear of using rnnemonics) may persist in the minds of some ToP readers due to various lingering misconceptions. In this regard, we conducted 3 practical experiments with college students using themnemonic keyword method to learn a setof psychologĩ cal terms (namely, phobias, for which we provide a sznnpie set, along with their mnemonic representations). We examined students' immediate and delayed recall, inference~demanding matching and categorization tests, and backward recall (recall of terms from definitions). On allmeasures, mnemonic students statistically outperformed control students. These findings provide further support for the use of classroom~based mnemonic techniques.Undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology courses often face an overwhelming amount of new terminology. Acquiring this terminology for an upcoming examination, and then retaining it for the longer term, may prove daunting for neophyte college students. In this regard, the mnemonic keyword method (e.g., Atkinson, 1975;Atkinson & Raugh, 1975) can be a useful technique. Although Atkinson and Raugh (1975) originally studied the keyword method in a foreign vocabulary learning context, others have applied this versatile strategy to the acquisition of both native vocabulary and unfamiliar terminology (e.g., see Levin, 1993;Pressley, Levin, & Delaney, 1982, for reviews). The keyword method works by recoding the unfamiliar word as a more familiar and acoustically similar keyword and then relating the keyword and word meaning 176 by way of an interactive visual image (Levin, 1983). Bower's (1970) componential analysis and Paivio's familiar dual-coding hypothesis (e.g., Clark & Paivio, 1987;Paivio, 1971Paivio, , 1986 provide theoretical explanations of these learning benefits.Carney and Levin (1998a) applied the keyword method to nervous system terminology typically presented in introductory psychology courses. We cornpared control students using a repetition strategy with students using two versions of the keyword method.Consider the term medulla, the part of the brain associated with control of heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure. Students in the repetition condition simply repeated the term and its association over and over to themselves. In one version of the keyword method, we provided students with a keyword for each term (e.g., medalfor medulla), and then asked them to generate an image relating the keyword to the term's meaning. In the second keyword version, we provided students with a description of an appropriate image: "Imagine the winner of a race. Heart pounding and breathing heavily, a medal is hung round the winner's neck." Participants studied 18 terms at 20-sec intervals. Following a 2~min filler task, students completed a matching test over the 18 terms and their definitions. The study yielded statistically significant mnemonic advantages. Carney and Levin recommended that ...

Two experiments were conducted in an effort to combine a mnemonic strategy for remembering individual items with a mnemonic procedure for remembering, and reasoning about, inter-item relationships. In Experiment 1, students using the combined mnemonic approach were able to identify more individual items (fish names from their pictures) and were subsequently able to remember more components of six studied hierarchies (order, family, and species names of the fish) than did students in an 'own best method' control condition. Additionally, and importantly, mnemonic students outperformed control students on an analogy task requiring inferences about superordinate, subordinate, and coordinate relationships. In Experiment 2, the initial number of to-be-learned fish was reduced so that the performance of both mnemonic and control students was comparable with respect to fish identification. Despite such item-level comparability, an advantage for mnemonically instructed students was observed on both immediate and two-day-delayed hierarchy tests. We suggest that by cementing lower-order connections, mnemonic strategies facilitate students' learning of higher-order information.