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 gating 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

Psychogenic amnesia

Answer 4

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

EX: Members of the military suffer unimaginable traumas all too often. Such events have the potential to spark psychogenic amnesia, in which memories for the trauma become inaccessible.

Question 5

Directed forgetting

Answer 5

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

Question 6

Retrieval inhibition hypothesis

Answer 6

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 7

Context shift hypothesis

Answer 7

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 8

Cognitive control

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Think/no-think (TNT) paradigm

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Psychogenic fugue

Answer 10

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 11

Spontaneous recovery

Answer 11

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

Question 12

Reminiscence

Answer 12

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

Question 13

Hypermnesia

Answer 13

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