MISC Flashcards
Chapter 11, pp. 312-313, 315-318
Describe Flashbulb memory and say why people have vivid autobiographical memories of flashbulb incidents.
It is a highly detailed, exceptionally vivid ‘snapshot’ of the moment and circumstances in which a piece of surprising and consequential news was heard. “Now print” mechanism
Neisser + Harsch compared the recall of the experience of learning about the event, testing people after 1 day + retesting after 2½ years–>finding a substantial drop in accuracy.
Flashbulb memories don’t need to be life-threatening. Davidson et al. found the same degree of loss of detail of 9/11 for flashbulb and everyday memories, although participants believed that their memory of 9/11 was clearer.
People do have vivid autobiographical memories of flashbulb incidents. Why?
1) Such incidents are highly distinctive, unlikely to be confused. This is not the case for most everyday memories.
2) We tend to talk about such events/watch them repeatedly on TV so rehearsing them.
3) They tend to be important events that change some aspect of our lives/ surroundings
4) They tend to give rise to emotions.
Applies to the symptoms that can follow from situations of extreme stress
Often involves “flashbacks,” extremely vivid memories of the scene of the initial terror.
Might be accompanied by nightmares and a more general state of anxiety
Describe Post-traumatic stress disorder
verbally accessible memory–>Links with the normal memory system
situationally accessible memory–>is highly detailed when it occurs as a flashback but cannot be called to mind intentionally.
The precise mechanism underlying memory disturbance in PTSD remains uncertain.
Classical conditioning–> environmental stimuli associated with the horrific moment being powerfully associated with the feeling of terror.
Incidental stimuli can act as a conditioned stimulus–>trigger off the emotional response, bringing back the associated memory.
Extinction–>focusing on the extinction of the fear response by having the patient imagine the scene under safe conditions controlled by the therapist
Virtual reality–>pilot who has developed PTSD under combat conditions, fly a simulated helicopter sortie over “virtual Vietnam.”
Describe the ANS response to stress
In a threatening situation, the amygdala signals the ANS to release adrenalin + cortisol, stress hormones that alert the organism for flight or fight.
When the danger passes, the brain normally signals the adrenal glands to stop producing stress hormones, gradually bringing the body back to normal.
In PTSD patients, this corrective process is reduced, leading to a more prolonged period of stress.
Treatment with propranolol aids this recovery process,
Describe the study by Gilbertson on twin Vietnam war veterans + their hippocampus volume
Patients with PTSD might have a somewhat smaller hippocampal volume than those without.
Prolonged stress can disrupt the operation of the hippocampus, possibly even leading to neuronal death
Studying Vietnam veterans who had developed PTSD, and who had a twin who had not experienced Vietnam.
Both PTSD veterans + their unexposed twins had smaller hippocampi than veterans who had experienced stress in Vietnam without developing PTSD + their unexposed twins.
A reduced hippocampus makes one more vulnerable to PTSD–>less able to recover from the huge surge in adrenalin associated with extreme stress.
Describe Berntsen + Rubin’s study of recurrent memories
Involuntary memories of autobiographical events that people subjectively experience as being repetitive.
Analysis of PTSD in a sample of 118 Danes who were tourists in Thailand or Sri Lanka at the time of the tsunami catastrophe
About half had experienced or witnessed danger to life + experienced intense fear, helplessness, or horror.
Some 40% of respondents reported recurrent memories, with the likelihood of this increasing for those who were close to the threatening wave.
The frequency of the recurrent memories coincided with the point of maximum emotional impact
Those directly threatened by the wave having recurrent memories of escaping vs those who had heard about the tragedy having recurrent memories of searching for loved ones
Reappearance hypothesis–>under certain circumstances, such as flashbulb memory and PTSD, memories can be created that later reappear in exactly the same form.
Describe why Intrusive normal memories are more accessible
Because they are
(1) more recent (2) more arousing (3) more likely to occur for positive events (4) likely to show the reminiscence bump, at least in older participants.
Describe the difference between recurrent dreams + memories by Berntsen and Rubin
Asked about participants each about the frequency of recurrent memories and recurrent dreams.
Recurrent memories are frequent + decline somewhat with age.
Recurrent dreams are less frequent + show a modest correlation with recurrent memories.
As we get older, we tend to have more positive recurrent memories, which are also more intense.
Recent recurrent memories are more likely than older ones
For those who are 40+–> positive recurrent memories are likely to come from late childhood/adolescence + characteristic reminiscence bump.
flashbacks that are observed in PTSD do not comprise a special type of memory
They have the same characteristics as recurrent memories in the normal course of life + both reflect the same basic principles of all types of ABG
Chapter 10, pp. 279-281
What is psychogenic amnesia? Describe Case of AMN
- Car crash, his memories only extended until the age of 17
- Despite this, AMN showed normal psychological and physical development + throughout his life, showed no evidence of psychological illness.
- First, psychogenic amnesia is triggered by severe psychological stressors.
- In striking contrast, memory for public events and general knowledge is often intact.
- Unlike in AMN’s case, amnesia can be global, affecting a person’s entire history
Describe different types of psychogenic amnesia
Psychogenic fugue: A form of psychogenic amnesia typically lasting a few hours or days following a severe trauma, where they forget their entire life history, including who they are
Triggers: Severe marital discord, bereavement, financial problems, or criminal offence, depression + head injury coupled with acute stress + trauma.
Lasts a few hours or a few days followed by remembering history once again but might have persisting amnesia for what took place during the fugue.
Functional amnesia can also be situation-specific, with the person experiencing severe memory loss for a particular trauma.
Triggers: Homicide, rape, torture, attempting suicide etc.
Describe Kikuchi’s study of two psychogenic amnesiacs
Neurologically normal + normal intelligence, but both had undergone a recent stressful event or period of time that led to extensive retrograde amnesia.
Both these patients were scanned with fMRI as they identified faces.
- Some faces were of strangers (novel faces).
- Others were of people the patients knew, with half of the people they met prior to amnesia (identifiable faces)
- Another half during the time affected by amnesia (unidentifiable faces).
- Patients did not recognize the novel face but could recognize all of the identifiable faces.
- Unidentifiable faces–> increased activation in the right lateral prefrontal cortex + reduced activity in the hippocampus, similar to retrieval suppression.
Extreme psychological distress–> causes retrieval suppression to be engaged involuntarily in reaction to certain stimuli.
- After treatment, one patient recovered his memories, and upon re-scanning, no longer exhibited the suppression pattern.
- Memories can sometimes be recovered spontaneously when particular cues are encountered
Chapter 8, pp. 213-214
What is mood congruent/dependent memory?
Mood-congruent memory: Bias in the recall of memories.
- Negative mood makes negative memories more readily available than positive, and vice versa.
- Unlike mood dependency, it does not affect the recall of neutral memories.
- Not the same as incidental context-dependent memory, b/c the main thing determining recall is that we have greater ease in recalling events that have an emotional tone that matches the current mood of the person.
- Velten technique—> a happy or sad mood is induced by encouraging participants to ponder sets of sad or happy statements. While sad, harder to evoke positive memories.
- When upset with someone, biased to recall unpleasant memories about them even if positive memories are also available for retrieval
Study: asked people to generate events from their past in response to cues (e.g. ship, street ).
They were in either a pleasant (P) or unpleasant (U) mood at encoding, and then again at retrieval 2 days later.
Mood was induced by having participants listen to either merry/melancholy music + thinking elating/depressing thoughts.
Results: free recall of the events was better when the mood state at test matched that at encoding, irrespective of the tone of the event recalled.
Chapter 10, pp. 287-292
Discuss different types of recovered memories
- When people can’t remember, they may engage in reconstruction + inference that adds things to memory that may not have taken place.
- May confuse the memory sources, and not distinguish between real + imagined stuff.
- This risk grows when they go to therapy with the goal of uncovering repressed memories.
- Using hypnosis, guided imagery, + other suggestive techniques may make discerning fact from fiction difficult.
- Memories can be recovered in many ways.
- In some cases, they are recovered gradually, through active search + reconstruction, targeted at remembering abuse the person is not sure ever occurred.
- In other cases, the experience comes to mind spontaneously, without active search.
- They can be recovered outside of therapy, triggered by a compelling need to explain some powerful reaction or feeling.
- Corroboration for recovered memories is sometimes lacking, especially in suggestive therapy
- The phenomenon of recovery: It is possible to forget an emotionally significant event over many years + later recover it.
- When a therapist has conviction in a memory’s reality, + a client starts to feel as though they are remembering
Describe study comparing corroboration of spontaneous and suggested memories
Study: Filled out a questionnaire about abuse, then asked about sources of corroboration
Independent raters used this information to seek evidence that would corroborate the event.
Memory was considered corroborated if:
(1) another individual reported learning about the abuse within a week after it happened
(2) another individual reported having been abused by the same perpetrator
(3) the perpetrator admitted to committing the abuse.
Results: Spontaneously recovered memory outside of therapy were corroborated at (37%)
- Memories recovered through suggestive therapy, however, could never be corroborated (0%).
- Therefore, discontinuous memory does not make an experience any less real than something a person has always remembered.
Might people who have spontaneous recovery experiences simply be forgetting prior occasions of thinking about it?
- Study: people with recovered or continuous memories had to write childhood memory for each of 25 titles describing common occurrences in childhood (e.g home alone)
- Asked to either focus on positive or negative aspects of the event
- Everyone returned 2 months later + generated the same memories again but switched the emotional frame or kept the one used last time
- Then returned for a final time 2 months later and recalled everything in the same emotional frame as 1st visit
Results: when the emotional framing on the final visit was different from 1st visit–>likely to forget having remembered the event during 2nd visit
when the emotional framing remained the same–>likely to recall having remembered the event during 2nd visit
Thus, shifting the way that people thought about the same memory made them forget thinking about the memory before.
-This tendency was much greater for people with recovered memories rather than continuous memories or no abuse history
- Recovered memories originate in different ways for spontaneous recovery + suggestive therapy recovery
- The spontaneously recovered group may have forgotten that they have previously recalled the recovered memory, perhaps due to context-dependent memory.
