Repression and retention Flashcards

1
Q

Define repression.

A

An active mechanism to prevent remembering.

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2
Q

What was Freud’s idea regarding repression?

A

Memories injurious to the ego are suppressed to avoid anxiety.

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3
Q

What did Wilkinson and Cargill (1955) do?

A

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.

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4
Q

What did Wilkinson and Cargill (1955) find?

A

Men had worse memory than women for the oedipal material.

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5
Q

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

A

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.

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6
Q

What evidence is there for general repression through arousal?

A

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.

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7
Q

What problems are there with general repression through arousal?

A
  • 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).
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8
Q

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

A

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.

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9
Q

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

A

Action-decrement theory.

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10
Q

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

A

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

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11
Q

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

A

Based on the same sort of idea.

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12
Q

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

A

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.

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13
Q

What did Anderson et al. (2006) find?

A
  • 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).
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14
Q

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

A

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

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15
Q

What did Finn and Roediger (2011) investigate?

A

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

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16
Q

What did Finn and Roediger (2011) find?

A

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.

17
Q

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

A

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

18
Q

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

A

• 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.

19
Q

What are the conclusions of Nelson (1978)?

A
  • ‘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.
20
Q

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

A
  • 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.
21
Q

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

A

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

22
Q

What is the problem of the expert?

A

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?

23
Q

What is the paradox of the expert?

A

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

24
Q

How is the problem of the expert avoided?

A

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

25
Q

What methods did S use to memorise information?

A

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

26
Q

In what way does eidetic memory differ from S?

A

It’s usually not for all forms of information.

27
Q

What did Stromeyer and Psotka (1970) do?

A

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.

28
Q

What is the problem with studying memory experts?

A

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.