Somehow this procedure created a new route to the memory that
sidestepped the emotional triggers. This is powerful and will allow
a subtle resolution of a range of mental and emotional problems that
plague many individuals in our society.
It is apparently really quite simple. One asks the disturbed person
to recall the underling issue and the related emotions experienced.
One then asks them to designate a key word to allow easy reference to
the memories and voila, it is now stepped around. The mind will
plausibly no longer focus on the emotions themselves and perhaps
reinforce those emotions. Better still it begins to deal with it
objectively. It also indicates why aspects of psychoanalysis will
work even by accident.
This is subtle but it is also a learnable protocol that we can
consciously apply to the distraught.
Bad Memories Can Be
Erased in Potential Breakthrough for Treating Depression and PTSD
People can be trained
to forget specific details associated with bad memories, according to
breakthrough findings that may usher the way for the development of
new depression and post-traumatic stress disorder therapies.
BY CHRISTINE HSU
JUNE 22, 2012
People can be trained
to forget specific details associated with bad memories, according to
breakthrough findings that may usher the way for the development of
new depression and post-traumatic stress disorder therapies.
New study, published
in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and
Cognition, reveals that individuals can be taught to forget
personal feelings associated with an emotional memory without
erasing the memory of the actual event.
Researchers found
that individuals were still able to accurately recall the cause of
the event even after they've been trained to forget the consequences
and personal meaning associated with the memory.
"The ability to
remember and interpret emotional events from our personal past forms
the basic foundation of who we are as individuals," lead
researcher Dr. Saima Noreen said in a news release.
"These novel
findings show that individuals can be trained to not think about
memories that have personal relevance and significance to them and
provide the most direct evidence to date that we possess some kind of
control over autobiographical memory," Noreen added.
Noreen and
co-researcher Malcolm MacLeod, a psychology professor from the
University of St. Andrews, asked study participants to generate
emotional memories in response to generic cue words like theater
barbecue, wildlife and so on.
Participants were
asked to recall the cause of the event, the consequence of the event
and their personal meanings attached to the event.
Researchers then asked
participants to come up with a single word that had personal meaning,
and which reminded them of the event.
Afterwards,
researchers showed participants the cue and the personal word pairing
and asked participants to either recall the memory associated with
the word pair or to not think about the associated memory.
Surprisingly,
researchers found that even though the entire autobiographical
episode was not forgotten, the emotional details associated with the
memory were.
Consequentially,
participants were able to remember the cause of the event, but were
able to forget what happened and how it made them feel.
"The capacity to
engage in this kind of intentional forgetting may be critical to our
ability to maintain coherent images about who we are and what we are
like," co-author Professor MacLeod said in a statement.
