Memory Suppression In Memory

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The title of the article I choose to write about is “Memory suppression can help people “unlearn” behavioral responses- but only for non-emotional memories.” The focus of the research article was to examine whether employing memory suppression can help individuals train their brains to forget behavioral responses associated with intrusive thoughts. I found this article interesting to read because I think that it is a motivating concept to be able to suppress unwanted memories from the brain that could cause an individual mental agony. More in-depth, I think it is an interesting thought to be able to training your brain to do such an amazing and beneficially mental practice. The Literature Review section of this paper explained past research used to teach participants to exclude unwanted memories from their mind by eliminating the memories awareness using what is known as a think/no-think (TNT) paradigm. There were two hypotheses presented in this study. The first one explored if holding in unwanted memories would hold back an individual’s behavioral actions that followed a memory. The second hypothesis explored the effects of undesirable emotions. The researchers had the participants’ complete three parts of the experiment: the learning phase, the TNT phase and the final memory phase. In the learning phase, the participants were presented forty eight object image pairs and asked to recall them. The participants were asked to learn a behavioral response for each item. The participants were then shown one of the forty eight objects and asked to press a key indicating left or right depending on the strength of the associated picture. After this, participants were then shown the correct related picture for two seconds as response. ... ... middle of paper ... ...tive therapy and some mental exercise. Although the results to this study did not support that memories triggered emotional response were suppressed behaviorally through complete the experiment, I believe that this study lays a good foundation to lead to this helpful solution for many individuals suffering from intrusive thoughts. I think a nest step would be to survey a larger participant pool and to see if there is a way to enhance to experiment to maybe add in being able to suppress behavioral response to emotional memories, effectively helping to remove some stress on those who suffer from intrusive thoughts due to cognitive disorders. References Sakaki, M., Kuhbandner, C., Mather, M., & Pekrun, R. (2014). Memory suppression can help people 'unlearn' behavioral responses—But only for nonemotional memories. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21(1), 136-141.

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