Memory by Baddeley Alan Eysenck Michael W. Anderson Michael C

Author:Baddeley, Alan, Eysenck, Michael W., Anderson, Michael C.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317610427
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Contents

Life is good, or memory makes it so

Terminology in research on motivated forgetting

Factors that predict motivated forgetting

Factors that predict memory recovery

Recovered memories of trauma: Instances of motivated forgetting?

Summary

Points for discussion

Further reading

References

CHAPTER 10

MOTIVATED FORGETTING

Michael C. Anderson

People usually think of forgetting as something bad. It is to lose our cherished past, to forget friends’ names, and to neglect our responsibilities. But as Jill Price’s remarkable memory (discussed in Chapter 9) illustrates, forgetting may be more desirable than we think. Price often yearns to forget, so that she can avoid continually reliving the events and emotions of terrible times. She has difficulty “letting go” and ‘getting past” things that most of us get over quickly. These sentiments reveal that more often than we realize, forgetting is exactly what we need to do. Sometimes we confront reminders of experiences that sadden us, as when after the death of a loved one, or after a broken relationship, objects and places evoke memories of the lost person. Other times, reminders trigger memories that make us angry, anxious, guilty, ashamed, or embarrassed; a face may remind us of an argument that we hope to get past; an envelope may bring to mind a very unpleasant task we are avoiding; or an image of the World Trade Center in a movie may elicit upsetting memories of 11 September. In the popular film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the main character, Joel, suffers so badly from memories of his lost love, Clementine, he seeks out a memory deletion clinic, to have all memories of her removed from his brain. Unfortunately, though we might at times yearn for them, no such clinics exist, and we cannot avoid life’s tendency to insert memories we wish were not there.

People do not take this situation lying down, however. They do something about it. When we confront reminders to unwanted memories, a familiar reaction often occurs—a flash of experience and feeling followed rapidly by an attempt to exclude the memory from awareness. Unlike in most other situations, retrieval is unwanted, and must be shut down. Suppressing retrieval shuts out the intrusive memories, restoring control over the direction of thought and our emotional well-being. Indeed, for veterans, witnesses of terrorism, and countless people experiencing personal traumas, the day-to-day reality of the need to control intrusive memories is all too clear. Any serious and general treatment of forgetting therefore needs to consider the motivated involvement of individuals as conspirators in their own memory failures. Is my failure to remember knocking over the Christmas tree (see Chapter 9) simply an accident of normal forgetting? Is the fact that you “forgot” to do that unpleasant task, yet again, truly an innocent mistake? In this chapter, we consider what is known about how people forget things that they would prefer not to remember.

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