Erin E. Martin
PhD Psychology
"Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge" - Prov. 23:12
Memories and Behavior
Erin Martin, Phd
Psychology
Sutin and Gillath (2009) discussed how the emotional intensity of memories can remain, while the coherence of the event does not. Middleton, Cromer, and Freyd (2005) referenced a case in which a woman began bizarre behavior without a history of treatment or psychological problems. This bizarre behavior began after a former foster parent moved to her neighborhood and she came in contact with her; this piece of the puzzle was not revealed until later. This woman’s bizarre behavior consisted of inflicting personal injury on herself, and finally jumping from a two story window. Prior to these events, she was aware of abuse in her past, but was not able to retrieve explicit details in recalling the memories. She also did not recall the events in which she inflicted personal injury, or the jump. As she began to recover the recent events of personal injury and jumping, those memories of the past also came flooding back with intensity and detail.
False Memories
Erin Martin, PhD
Psychology
Sometimes when I think of childhood memories, I wonder “did that really happen? It seems so long ago”, and almost feel detached from it. Our memories are what make us who we are, how we think of ourselves, our perception of personal relationships, basis for future behavior, and explanation of past behavior. Whether that memory is a false one, or a real one, it is now part of us. There has been debate over the plausibility of recovering suppressed or forgotten memory. Some researchers believe that forgotten or recovered memories are false memories that have been implanted through poor self-monitoring mechanism, or suggestibility (Braun, Ellis, & Loftus, 2002; Clancy, McNally, Schacter, Lenzenweger, & Pitman, 2002; Johnson, 2006; Loftus and Bernstein, 2005). Other researchers believe that there is the likelihood that forgotten memories are difficult to recall until other physical trace memories of stimulus and environment are in place to retrieve the memory (Steffens, & Mecklenbräuker, 2007).
Memory and Anxiety
Erin Martin, PhD
Psychology
Have you ever been put on the spot to remember a person’s name or the name of a TV show? When put in the spotlight and made anxious, you may find it harder to retrieve desired information. Vasa et al (2007) discovered that children with anxiety disorders had lower scores on memory tasks; specifically, children with social phobia (SP) showed lower visual memory, while verbal memory showed no difference between children with and without an anxiety disorder. Vasa cited several studies which found dysfunction of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) in those with anxiety disorder, one of which was Pine et al (1999) who found a link between memory deficit and predicting anxiety disorders. The medial temporal lobe (MTL) and hippocampus involved in memory have been shown to have less function in those with social phobias and depression (Sternberg, 2009; Vasa et al., 2007). This dysfunction may play a role in the disorders and in the memory processes, which may influence each other; lower function of the MTL may result in a disorder, or the disorder is associate with the dysfunction of the MTL. The memory deficit could be due to two ideas: dysfunction within the brain circuits in memory processing, or biased attention processing. Memory in anxiety disorder may be influenced by an attention shift during encoding, as well as the difficulty suppressing threatening information, resulting in less attention for nonthreatening and emotional stimuli. (Vasa et al., 2007)
