Repression and retention

Question 1

Define repression.

Answer 1

An active mechanism to prevent remembering.

Question 2

What was Freud’s idea regarding repression?

Answer 2

Memories injurious to the ego are suppressed to avoid anxiety.

Question 3

What did Wilkinson and Cargill (1955) do?

Answer 3

An experimental test of repression - told pts they were doing a personality study and had them listen to a story containing dream description which was either neutral or contained fairly obvious sexual imagery with an Oedipal context.

Question 4

What did Wilkinson and Cargill (1955) find?

Answer 4

Men had worse memory than women for the oedipal material.

Question 5

What is a criticism for Wilkinson and Cargill (1955)?

Answer 5

McGullough et al. (1976) found that if pts aren’t told the experiment about personality there was no effect, so results are just a self-presentational bias. It’s a real effect, but not repression - a passive mechanism of not thinking about it because it’s awkward etc.

Question 6

What evidence is there for general repression through arousal?

Answer 6

Levinger and Clark (1961) did a free association task with neutral or emotional stimulus words, measured GSR and found that free associates to neutral words were recalled better than those to emotional words.

Question 7

What problems are there with general repression through arousal?

Answer 7

• Levinger and Clark tested memory for associates rather than the stimuli, which is generally better if they’re arousing (Rubin, 1984).
• Their memory test was also immediate - the influences of arousal are sometimes clearer after delays (Kleinsmith and Kaplan, 1963).

Question 8

What did Parkin, Lewinsohn and Folkard (1982) do?

Answer 8

A replication of Levinger and Clark with a delay added - found that after 7 days, memory for associates to emotional words is better than for neutral ones.

Question 9

What is the traditional explanation for the effect found by Parkin, Lewinsohn and Folkard (1982)?

Answer 9

Action-decrement theory.

Question 10

What does the Action-Decrement theory (Walker, 1958) state?

Answer 10

Memory traces take time to consolidate - physiological arousal increases the time fir the trace to consolidate, but may improve longer term encoding.

Question 11

How does action-decrement theory compare to recent neurological models?

Answer 11

Based on the same sort of idea.

Question 12

What did Anderson, Wais and Gabrieli (2006) do to investigate retrograde arousal enhancement?

Answer 12

Arousal should be more effective if applied after the event happens, while it’s being consolidated. So they presented pts with a neutral test picture, followed by an interval (4/9secs) and then a modulator (arousing/neutral), followed by a flanker task. They were then given memory tests for both neutral and arousing stimuli after 1 week.

Question 13

What did Anderson et al. (2006) find?

Answer 13

• memory for arousing stimuli is enhanced.
• memory for neutral stimuli shortly before arousing ones is enhanced (rather than the intuitive expectation that it would be impaired).
• enhancement is for remembering (context) rather than knowing (familiarity).

Question 14

What does McCaugh’s (2006) preservation-consolidation theory state?

Answer 14

Arousal generally enhances memory for items and associates at long retention intervals - no experimental support for general repression.

Question 15

What did Finn and Roediger (2011) investigate?

Answer 15

Reconsolidation from arousal - retrieval involves re-coding, so will arousal enhance its storage?

Question 16

What did Finn and Roediger (2011) find?

Answer 16

Vocabulary learning (Swahili/English pairs) is enhanced by negatively arousing pictures immediately after or two seconds after successful retrieval. However, arousal does not enhance restudying items, rather than retrieving them.

Question 17

Why do Finn and Roediger propose that arousal doesn’t enhance performance when restudying?

Answer 17

Restudying doesn’t involve creating a memory, or even accessing one - just letting familiar information wash over you. Doesn’t do anything!

Question 18

How did Nelson (1978) investigate the permanence of memory?

Answer 18

• standard paired associate learning (48-party, 26-book)
• 24 pts, each with 20 pairs to learn.
• 4 week delay then testing by recall, recognition and relearning.
- 232 items forgotten at cued recall, of which 120 aren’t recognised
• when these 120 items are relearned, there’s a substantial advantage (50 rather than 20%) for learning the old associates than new ones.

Question 19

What are the conclusions of Nelson (1978)?

Answer 19

• ‘Forgotten’ memories can still influence behaviour.
• Forgetting may be a progressive reduction in availability through interference or partial decay rather than a deletion of the memory.

Question 20

What did Luria’s (1968) case study of ‘S’ find?

Answer 20

• he appeared to have almost unlimited memory for numbers and equations.
• perfect recall for an equation studied for a few minutes and grids 15 years later.
• number grids of almost unlimited size memorised requiring about 3-4 seconds per item.

Question 21

What problems were created by S’s inability to forget?

Answer 21

When doing a remembering act, he found it difficult to distinguish between different times with similar memories.

Question 22

What is the problem of the expert?

Answer 22

The idea that the more information one has in one’s memory, the more interference there is and it becomes harder to learn new things?

Question 23

What is the paradox of the expert?

Answer 23

The more you learn, the easier it becomes to learn new things (Smith, Adams and Schorr, 1978).

Question 24

How is the problem of the expert avoided?

Answer 24

By encoding information on context - associating the new memories with old ones, making encoding more efficient.

Question 25

What methods did S use to memorise information?

Answer 25

No specific training, but used imagery, synaesthesia and some strategies e.g. Method of Loci.

Question 26

In what way does eidetic memory differ from S?

Answer 26

It’s usually not for all forms of information.

Question 27

What did Stromeyer and Psotka (1970) do?

Answer 27

Studied Elizabeth, a 23 year old artist and teacher at Harvard.
Used the superposition method of testing typographic eidetic memory, e.g. Random-dot stereograms (Julenz, 1964).
Found that Elizabeth could a million-dot pattern with one eye, then after 4 hours was able to report the figure in depth when presented with the second image.

Question 28

What is the problem with studying memory experts?

Answer 28

Replication - dramatic examples of almost unlimited and unfading memory do seem to exist, but are hard to study systematically and tend to be domain-specific. Nonetheless memory theories need to account for them.