Emotional Memory Flashcards
What is Emotion?
a cluster of three distinct but interrelated sets of phenomena—
physiological responses, overt behaviors, and conscious feelings—produced in response to a situation
traumatic memory study
- participants talked about their traumatic experience - the plane crash
- participants were then asked to talk about a neutral even where they were traveling
results
The Air Transat event was associated with a more detailed memory.
○ Passengers remembered more than double the amount of details for the airline incident in comparison to the neutral condition. Thus they have a highly detailed memory for this very emotional event.
○ Of course this does not tell us anything about accuracy
How Do We Examine Accuracy For Real Life Events?
Brown and Kulik (1977) suggested that some memories are especially enduring.
Flashbulb memories: “a vivid, enduring memory associated with a personally significant and emotional event, often including such details as
where the individual was or what they were doing at the time of the event.” –APA
The Air Transat Event seems to fit here
But are these types of events accurate?
9/11 study
On September 12, 2001, 54 Duke students recorded their memory of first hearing about the terrorist attacks of September 11 and of a recent everyday event. They were tested
again either 1, 6, or 32 weeks later.”
Test-retest approach used as a proxy for accuracy. It measures the consistency of recall across multiple time points
Key Result: In comparison to the neutral event, 9/11 memories were more vivid/detailed and folks were more but confident in their memory for that event. But the 9/11 event did not differ in accuracy from the neutral event.( a lot of errors)
Caveats
Not every study shows the same pattern of results. For 9/11 in particular, some studies
show that the vividness of the memory depends on how personally relevant it was to the rememberer (e.g., how close you lived to the event).
Memory in the Laboratory
● Researchers can study the effects of emotion on memory by creating emotional experiences in the laboratory and then testing memory
● What are the cons of a laboratory versus an autobiographical
memory approach?
-personal relevence are non-existing in a memory that is created in a lab
Two Key Points From the Reading
● Emotion does not enhance accuracy for all detail types...
● Emotion enhances the “central” details but not the “peripheral” details
● This might be strongest for negative memories
Emotion enhances the “central” details but not the “peripheral” details - what does that mean?
ex:
u see a bear walking to school
- I remember seeing the bear and its brown, wet fur…>“central” detail
- But I do not remember where I saw it… > “peripheral” details
meaning: they remenber big details but not small ones
Two Key Points From the Reading
- central details usually are specific sensory details
- more promnent in negative experiences
-
Negative memories might be more sensory, and positive
memories are more “semantic”
ex: i saw a snake with yellow eyes vs i aet a cake last week
What is Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may develop when someone lives through or witnesses an event in which they believe that there is a threat to their life or physical integrity and safety and experiences fear, terror, or helplessness.
Individuals with PTSD often relive the trauma in painful recollections; they avoid activities associated with the traumatic event; they experience higher physiological arousal
How Can we Treat PTSD?
● PTSD can be treated in different ways, including through psychotherapy or psychopharmacological intervention
● Researchers are trying to find new treatments that focus on altering the
trauma memory
● A lot of this work involves using animal models
Can Non-human Animals Experience Emotions?
● Most researchers study “emotion” in non-human animals by studying fear.
● Fear response: a cluster of physiological changes, overt behaviors, and conscious reactions that accompany the emotion of fear; in the laboratory, the physiological changes and motor behaviors (such as freezing) are often taken to imply presence of fear, whether or not the accompanying conscious experience of fear can be documented
● But we cannot measure conscious feelings!
Common Paradigm in Non-human Animals
Conditioned response: a classically conditioned response (CR), such as physiological arousal, that is produced in response to a neutral
stimulus that that has been paired with an emotion-evoking stimulus
ex: everytime they go to chamber a they get shocked after a couple of try, they will freez when going to that chamber
Caveats
● Are we measuring emotions in the same way?
● Are we assessing the same form of memory?
Can We Edit Memories?
Retrieved memories become fragile and are consolidated again → reconsolidation
Memory is a “work in progress” … constantly constructed and remodeled in response to learning and conditions
Some evidence suggests we can “reconsolidate” a memory. Reconsolidation refers to the ideas that when a memory is retrieved, it enters a vulnerable state and can be changed.
Can we use this for therapeutic intervention?
Rat study - condition 1
Nader et al. 2000
- paired a tone (sound) with a shoke
2.** injected rats with a protein synthesis inhibitor (Anisomycin) after a newly encoded event**
- Anisomycin prevents changes in synapses (by blocking the
making of new proteins) that are involved in the formation of new
memories
result: they didnt freezed when the tone came by the next day (3 day) (like they would if the protein wasnt blocked)
condition 2
- here the tone,get the shock
- next day get the protein blocked
result: they freez to the tone in the next day(3 day)
condition 3 : Reconsolidation condition
- here tone,get shocked
- next day : gave the tone, right after he blocked protein - gave the inhibitor
result: no freezing by the next day
Reconsolidation in Animal Models
some property of retrieval may destabilize the structural changes such that they now have to be reconsolidated with the aid of new protein
Think about what the different conditions show
What did each condition actually demonstrate?
Reconsolidation in Humans?
- Participants reactivated a trauma memory
- Drug (Propranolol) administered to block amygdala stress receptors while reconsolidation of the memory is taking place; control group receives placebo
- One week later, reactivation of same memory = lower stress responses in the experimental group, they still had the memory the response was just different
This type of research is in it’s early days and can be controversial in terms of efficacy and mechanisms
same idea then animal but different drug
Optogenetics:
a technique that uses light to “turn on” or “turn off” neurons at precise times
- finding the memory (by finding the cells that are connected to the memory)
- activate the memory using light
- the switch(channel rhodopsin), turns the brain cell on and off
- attach the switch, to the sensor and inject to the brain. so whenever the memory is being formed ,any active cell for that particular memory will also have the light-sensitive stwich installed in it
- they were able to re-activate a memory using lazer(light)
- the rat in a new enviroment froze even though there was no schock in this box
