Recovered/Discovered Memories

Question 1

Types of episodic memory

Answer 1

-Continuous: always accessible and remembered
-Discovered (suppressed): Not always accessed or remembered for some period. Have not accessed for a while but given the right cue, may remember. Often negative
-Recovered(repressed): Cannot access for a long period of time and becomes accessible for some reason.

Question 2

Suppression vs. Repression

Answer 2

-Suppression: Avoid retrieving the memory, to forget on purpose.
-Repression: An unconscious mechanism to banish unacceptable thought
If someone had tried to remember a memory in suppression, they would be able to. however, cannot if the memory is repressed

Question 3

Repressed memory

Answer 3

Loss of memory due to some short of traumatic event. The memory was originally successfully encoded but became inaccessible at some period of time that is not due to a neurological condition or substance.

Question 4

Recall

Answer 4

Recovered memories that were inaccessible and later remembered, usually in therapy.
-Criminal cases that derive from recall involve really old cases and not much data on them.

Question 5

Trauma

Answer 5

Experience of stress and how the individual responds to it. What is traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for another. Tends to be associated with the feeling that one has no control over that has happened.
Feelings of extreme negative emotion
-When arousal is low, our memories are poor, and when it is too high, often aren’t able to remember either.
-Intermediate level is where memory is the best
-Anywhere from 25-80% of disasters and accidents lead to memory loss.

Question 6

Think/No-Think

Answer 6

1. study 50 word pairs
2. when see words, should actively try to forget the word that was paired to it
   only given first word as cue for both think and no think words. Memory is poor for the no-think words compared to others.

Question 7

Motivated forgetting

Answer 7

People who are more likely to forget trauma-related words are also more likely to dissociate

Question 8

Directed-Forgetting paradigm

Answer 8

View list of words, after, each participant is prompted to remember or forget that word
-complete dissociative experiences scale
-free recall and recognition memory test
-Attention divided during phase 1 of the study, those who score higher remember fewer trauma words than neutral.
-Attention divided: people low on dissociative have a tendency to remember fewer neutral words than trauma words. only on free recall?

Question 9

Relationship between trauma and dissociation

Answer 9

-support view that trauma causes repression
-no significant relationship between fantasy proneness and trauma as well as suggestibility and trauma

Question 10

Studying recovered memories DRM

Answer 10

Participants completed DRM task and forgot-it-all-along task. Percentage of words recalled showed no difference in general memory ability
-Memories recovered in therapy significantly higher.
-People who have memories of childhood sexual abuse show more false memories than most people

Question 11

memory DRM what did we learn?

Answer 11

Experiencing a traumatic event does not predict susceptibility to false memories but there is a link between recovering memory in therapy and susceptibility to false memories.
-Potentially the therapy

Question 12

What are alternate explanations for repressed memories?

Answer 12

-Memory was suggested to them
-Existing memory was reinterpreted
-Memory was forgotten and then re-remembered
-memory was re-remembered but unreported
-amnesia occurred but to organic causes
-amnesia was feigned