The Memories You Want To Forget Are The Hardest Ones To Lose

Painful, emotional memories that people would most like to forget may be the toughest to leave behind, especially when memories are created through visual cues, according to a new study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ScienceDaily (Aug. 16, 2007) 

                Keith Payne, an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Science, carried out an experiment which discuss whether emotional memories can be intentionally forgotten like those memories which are not as relevant to our everyday life. Those neutral memories can be from wrong directions, an outdated phone number or the change of a meeting time. It is believed that this intentional forgetting, allows an update on memory for new information to be stored. However, Payne and Elizabeth Corrigan (a graduate psychology student) found that there are emotional events not as strong, like getting a bad grade or having a negative comment from someone could make it complicated to intentionally forget that memory.

                As  Payne and Corrigan explain, when people are intentionally trying to forget information they have to segregate information into what they want to remember and what they don’t want and block off that information they don’t want to retrieve later on. When emotion is involved in a memory, these two factors which help the intentional forgetting of memory are disables as people make connections between their emotional events and their everyday life and because of this, there is a complication when trying to separate the information, hence difficult to forget that memory.

                A few experiments were done prior to this one. However, those studies used emotion-laden words as stimulus such as “death”and “sex”. Whereas, Payne and Corrigan’s experiment asked 218 participants to see a set of pictures and then their expressions were recorded. This was because pictures will have a stronger impact on the participants than the letters used in previous experiments. For instance, the word “murder” could or could not have made the participants feel any fear or negative emotions in them. On the other hand, if a graphic picture of a murder is shown to the participant the effect and emotion will probably be more noticeable and change the way the participants feels.

                The results of the experiment showed that participants could not forget emotional events as easy as those memories which were “ordinary”. Another finding was that both pleasant and unpleasant memories are not easily forgotten intentionally. These findings contribute to see the ways in which emotions confine mental control and answer the question whether intentional forgetting can be helpful when treating painful or traumatic experiences. Findings also show that emotion puts limits on the ability we have to control the contents of our minds. Payne also pointed out that if motivation is powerful enough then intentional forgetting could also be applied to those memories which are strongly connected to emotion. Finally, he pointed out the fact that another experiment might be needed to test the strategies and effectiveness on treatments to voluntarily forget memories.