Essay Questions Flashcards
(15 cards)
What charcterizes traumatic memory in most people?
Persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic material, effortful avoidance, inability to recall important aspects of the trauma
How likely are people to forget a traumatic event?
Williams Study: interviewed 136 women and asked if they ever had sexual contact by force, who was involved in it, etc. and tested whether these women recalled the incident for which they’d been admitted to the hospital (check against record). They needed to remember the actual index event to be considered as having remembered the abuse. Otherwise researchers decided that they had forgotten the sexual abuse.
Results: There is a footnote in her data mentioning the number of people who said they had never been sexually abused, which is 12%; suggesting that 68% of women who didn’t remember the specific event (the one for which they went to the hospital) did recall being sexually abused in childhood.
What mechanisms might explaing the forgetting of traumatic memories?
Terr’s Type I (singular, exclusive, higher rates of remembering) and Type II (multiple, repeated, higher incidence of forgetting) trauma distinction
Explains forgetting by motivating suppression in Type II trauma
Once forgotten, how likely it is that people will recover the traumatic memories (against recovery)?
Bass & Davis: Provide symptom checklists to help women discern if they’ve been sexually abused and advice on how to recover repressed memories of abuse.
Bass & Davis did not have training in psychology and there were huge problems with the symptom checklists they had developed, which made it possible for almost anyone to infer that they’ve been sexually abused.
Once forgotten, how likely it is that people will recover the traumatic memories (pro recovery)?
Schooler Case Studies: all these examples, clearly, support recovered memory theorists’ claim that humans have the capacity to totally forget highly traumatic memories. Also, people usually recover memories due to a certain cue that reminds them of the incident.
How accurate is the recovery of forgotten trauamtic events?
Chris Lost in a Shopping Mall Study: In the study they gave participants 4 short narratives describing childhood events all supposedly provided by family members. Among those narratives one was a false narrative of the person being lost in a shopping mall. The narrative involved some plausible details that were provided by the family members but getting lost itself was a fabricated event.
Results: Many participants falsely remember that they were indeed lost in the shopping mall and they also started to provide details to the story.
What mechanisms might account for the recovery of forgotten traumatic memories?
Brewin’s Dual Representation Theory: memory is processed by two different systems: (1) Verbal access memory (VAM): system processes conscious & voluntarily retained information that can be later on accessed through verbal cues; and (2) Situational access memory (SAM): system processes sensory information, mainly images, and it can be accessed through situational cues. It doesn’t have a narrative around rather it has a snapshot quality. This system encodes information that does not receive enough attention to be stored in VAM. SAM can be re-experienced automatically.
According to Brewin flashbacks and emotion-laden responses are an example of SAM. VAM (voluntary) are more likely to be disrupted for individuals with PTSD because of the dissociation state experienced during the traumatic event. SAM (involuntary) are more likely to be vivid and less disrupted. Thus it accounts for both characteristics of traumatic memories.
How do conversations shape what is remembered within the conversation and how it reshapes the memory of the participants in the conversation?
Suparna Rajaram: effects of collaborative remembering on subsequent memory. P’s first learn the information individually and then they recall it as a group (or individually in the control condition).
Results: The group members recall more than any individual remembers alone (collaborative facilitation)
The group remembers less that one individual’s mnemonic capacity (collaborative inhibition). Collaborative inhibition suggests that group remembering is selective because not everything possible is remembered.
Explanations for collaborative inhibition
Social loafing: (e.g. like the diffusion of responsibility in groups- the more people there are in a group the more people think that there will certainly be someone in the group who will encode and recall the information)
Retrieval Blockage: different group members use different retrieval strategies and an individual’s use of a specific strategy leads to retrieval blockage for another group member
Sampling bias: groups are more likely to remember shared rather unique pieces of information
What is the effect of speaker on listener’s subsequent memory?
Speakers affect their listeners’ memory through: (1) Reinforcement of the mentioned memories; (2) Social contagion: The speaker implants a new memory in the listener or alters the memory of the listener by substituting one memory for another; and (3) Socially-shared-retrieval-induced forgetting: What the speaker says or, more typically, doesn’t say, induces forgetting in the listener—selective remembering induces forgetting.
How to induce Socially Shared Retrieval Induced Forgetting?
(1) not mention anything at all related to what you’d like to be forgotten, or, (2) you can talk about things that are related to what you’d like to be forgotten, but just not mention that one thing.
How does the DSM define PTSD?
A. The person experienced /was exposed to/witnessed a traumatic event which caused the person to feel horrified, afraid and helpless
B. Traumatic event is persistently re-experienced
C. Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with trauma & numbing of general responsiveness
What is the paradox in the DSM definition of PTSD?
Paradox is between the symptoms in Criterion B.1. & 3. (traumatic event is persistently re-experienced) and Criterion C.3. (inability to recall important aspects of trauma)
People diagnosed with PTSD both recurrently re-experience intrusive recollections of the traumatic event and exhibit memory fragmentation or inability to recall important aspects of trauma
PTSD specific memory problems are usually associated with?
repression/suppression, dissociation, neurochemical problems (increase in cortisol) and retrieval problems.
Experimental evidence attempting to answer the PTSD memory paradox
Twin studies did not support the hypothesis that a smaller hippocampus can account for the memory problems associated with PTSD
