Chapter 10 - Motivated Forgetting

Question 1

Positivity bias

Answer 1

The tendency, increasing over the lifespan, to recall more pleasant memories than either neutral or unpleasant ones.

Question 2

Emotion regulation

Answer 2

Goal-driven monitoring, evaluating, altering, and gatings one’s emotional reactions and memories about emotional experiences.

Question 3

Repression

Answer 3

In psychoanalytic theory, a psychological defense mechanism that banishes unwanted memories, ideas, and feelings into the unconscious in an effort to reduce conflict and psychic pain. Theoretically, repression can either be conscious or nonconscious.

Question 4

Intentional forgetting

Answer 4

Forgetting arising from processes initiated by a conscious goal to forget. Includes conscious strategies, such as suppression and intentional context shits. Does not include cases when forgetting is non-accidental but not consciously intended.

Question 5

Motivated forgetting

Answer 5

Encompasses behavior in which people may want to forget unwanted memories, either consciously or unconsciously.

Question 6

Psychogenic amnesia

Answer 6

Profound and surprising episodes of forgetting the events of one’s life, arising from psychological factors, rather than biological damage or dysfunction.

Question 7

Mnemic neglect effect

Answer 7

People’s desire to view themselves favorably leads them to limit the encoding of negative feedback. People seem to regulate their memory to protect their self-image.

Question 8

Directed forgetting

Answer 8

The tendency for an instruction to forget recently experienced items to induce memory impairment for those items.

Question 9

Retrieval inhibition hypothesis

Answer 9

A proposed mechanism underlying list-method directed forgetting suggesting that first-list items are temporarily inhibited in response to the instruction to forget and can be reactivated by subsequent presentations of the to-be-forgotten items.

Question 10

Context shift hypothesis

Answer 10

An alternative explanation for list-method directed forgetting, positing that forget instructions separate first-list items into a distinct context, which unless reinstated during the final test will make the later context a relatively ineffectual retrieval cue.

Question 11

Cognitive control

Answer 11

The ability to flexibly control thoughts in accordance with our goals, including our ability to stop unwanted thoughts from rising to consciousness.

Question 12

Think/no-think paradigm

Answer 12

A procedure designed to study the ability to volitionally suppress retrieval of a memory when confronted with reminders.

Question 13

Direct suppression

Answer 13

Recruited right lateral frontal cortex area, causing reduced hippocampal activity.

Question 14

Thought substitution

Answer 14

Recruited areas in the left prefrontal cortex, causing higher hippocampal activity.

Question 15

Psychogenic fugue

Answer 15

A form of psychogenic amnesia typically lasting a few hours or days following a severe trauma, in which afflicted individuals forget their entire life history, including who they are.

Question 16

Spontaneous recovery

Answer 16

The term arising from the classical conditioning literature given to the re-emergence of a previously extinguished conditioned response after delay; similarly; forgotten declarative memories have been observed to recover over time.

Question 17

Reminiscence

Answer 17

The remembering again of the forgotten, without learning or a gradual process of improvement in the capacity to revive past experiences.

Question 18

Hypermnesia

Answer 18

The improvement in recall performance arising from repeated testing sessions on the same material.