Support for Brown and Kulik is from the research where it is shown how sudden shocks or surprises increase adrenaline production. Stress hormones are known to lead to stronger memory information/ so high arousal of a sudden even triggers changes and increases the production of adrenaline. This is then likely to form into a FBM. Its an advantage to have this medical knowledge as it is objective so there is no risk of demand characteristics, it I also high in reliability.
Contradictory evidence for FBM's are that high arousal and danger might be the cause of them. Write found that there was little evidence for witnesses of the Hills-borough football disaster having FBM's. 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death and this was seen by hundreds. After 5 months fans tended to have only a vague memory and not the clear FBM's one which was expected.
However it could be said that the witnesses may not have wanted to recall the events as it may have been traumatic to remember so they pretended they forgot.
Another contradicting point for FBM is the MSM. Neisser has criticised the concept of FBM's and says they can be explained in other ways. They could be explained by using the models of memory, for example the MSM say that we remember long lasting memories because of rehearsal, and a traumatic event may be rehearsed.
Repression:
Freud believed that forgetting is an unconscious motivated process. He came up with motivated forgetting which involved memories which were too emotionally painful to be forgotten using a defence mechanism such as repression and denial. It was said that in repression painful feelings are at first conscious and then are forgotten, but they are stored in the unconscious from where they can be retrieved. Repression can range from momentary lapses of forgetting the details of a horrific event such as a murder. Amnesia can occur in cases where the person has experienced something extremely painful. Freud says that the Oedipus and Elektra complex go through repression whereby the child represses incestuous desires towards the the opposite sex parent and feelings of rivalry towards the same sex parent. Freud didn’t believe all forgetting can be explained through repression but most of it could be due to getting rid of unwanted and unnecessary information.
People may forget experiences because of unpleasant associations for e.g. you may forget your homework because you didn’t want to do it so you simply pushed it out of your mind. This is called suppression which is a conscious or semi conscious behaviour as distinct from repression that occurs unconsciously.
Repression is when the ego protects itself from emotional conflicts. Traumatic events cause anxiety and to reduce this the memory of the even is forgotten, this anxiety maybe expressed through dreams or disordered behaviour as in the the case of little Hams.
The repressed memories continue to affect conscious thought,desire and action even though there is no conscious memory of the traumatic event. Once the traumatic event is repressed from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind it make individual feel better,at least temporarily.
And evaluation point for repression is research by Levinger and Clark, they carried out a study where the P's were given negatively charged words and neutral words. They had to do a word association task whilst having their skin response measured. The P's were then given the cue words again and asked the associations hey had just reported. They found that P's took longer to recall the negatively charged associations than the neutral ones. So it could be said that it took longer to access the unconscious mind for the word associations.
It has been reported that between 20-60% of people undergoing therapy as a result of child sexual abuse report periods in their lives when they could not remember the abuse had taken place. This supports repression as it shows that the memories had been repressed in their unconscious. However it could be said that they did not want to recall the events so therefore pretended they couldn’t remember.
Freud published case studies for his neurotic patients to support his ideas of repression. These have been questioned as inaccurate, however the case studied were unique and one off and can't be generalised as the study took place on white,middle class neurotic women only. The study could be therefore be said to be Oestocentric and culture bias. The study however did have rich qualitative data.
Post traumatic stress disorder is where people re-live traumatic events that have taken place in theory lives. This contradicts repression theory as these people are always remembering it as its not being repressed like Freud says they should.
Robinson et al found that the memory of childbirth pain seems to be forgotten or repressed over time. This supports Freud's theory as child birth can be very traumatic however there are problems with using this evidence to support repression. It is difficult to generalise as the pain of childbirth is more painful and lasts longer than other types of pain.
Depression:
patients with depression often have memory problems that affect them in various ways. One way is through negative recall bias, this is when they are more likely to recall unhappy events than happy events. This is known as mood congruent memory. Another explanation for poor memory is that they have physical abnormalities in their brains. These could be related to biochemical activity for brain structure damage.
A second link between depression and poor memory is that depression may lead people to be inattentive and fail to encode passing events in LTM. In this case it isn’t so much that the depressed person has forgotten but that the memory was never stored in the first place.
An evaluation point of depression is research by Bower, he hypnotised P's and then told them they were in a happy or sad mood. He found that the p's tended to recall more of the words accurately if they recalled them in the same mood they had learned them. P's who learned the list in a sad mood recalled them better in that mood. The finding obtained in this study supports the mood congruent memory. However this study lacks ecological validity as well as mundane realism. It could also be said that the level of depression in the patient would affect the findings of the study.
Clinical depression patients who often have memory problems can be related to this study. They had trouble remembering memories about themselves and recall more negative memories than positive ones.. this may be because they may have gone through more negative memories than positive so they feel the need to dwell of the negative thoughts.
Cognitive therapy attempts to get P's to have more balanced view rather than a negative one and helps them see the positives as well as the negatives. Part of cognitive therapy attempts to get P's to recall less depressing memories and more positive memories.
Although research on repression and depression suggests that emotion leads to memory loss the evidence of FBM's suggests the opposite. Within all the three explanations there is both supporting and refuting evidence so it might be best to take an eclectic view of how emotion and memory are connected.
by
farjana_sharmin (student)
