In the present study, the effects of emotional valence of words and gender on directed forgetting were investigated. The directed forgetting effect was investigated by requiring from participants to forget the words that they have to recall and at the same time, to recall the words that they have to forget. The study was composed of two experiments. In the first experiment, the participants were presented with a list of words consisting of neutral and emotional words once, while the participants were presented with the same list twice in the second experiment. Both experiments were composed of two stages. Under the item method, the words which were presented with the directions of forget or recall in the first stage were presented again with the directions of recall what you have forgotten or forget what you have recalled in the second stage. In the both stages, the subjects were given a free recall test for all the words presented before.