Memory Psych Essays

auto-biographical memory & childhood amnesia

FB: Brown & Kulik 1970's. Neisser 1982 due to repeated exposure = rehearsal. Pearl Harbour bombing & baseball game = fabricated memory, modified not reconstructed.Bohannon 1988: challenge disaster measured 8-9 months after, recall dropped 77% - 58%. Conway 1994 MT resignation, 923 p's 2/3 UK rest other nationalities interviewed within fortnight of event & group interviewed again 11 months later after 11 months 86% of UK participants had vivid memory. cultural relevance but biased & low V diff between samples less generalizable. FB hard to measure, low R. Increased rehersal media. Extra rehearsal = significance? 

Repression: Freud, difficult to retrieve but remain available. Anderson 1995. Event specific amnesia for specific period e.g. violent criminals who claim they cannot remember carrying out the crime. Ethically impossible to make use of traumatic events involved in repression.
Repressors low scores on anxiety, high defensiveness. Measure  time taken to recall negative childhood memories. Repressors slower than other groups, experienced most indifference & hostility from fathers.Herman and Schatzow in 1987 who found that 28% of a group of female incest victims reported severe memory deficits from childhood, and such repressed memories were most frequent among woman who had suffered violent abuse. Raises major ethical and legal issues concerning therapist’s responsibilities & effects of accusations on family members

Amnesia, Anterograde remember new info. retrograde difficulty in remembering events that happened before amnesia. organic: damage to brain structure e.g.frontal lobe & excessive alcohol consumption. Functional amnesia psychological factors e.g. fugue state & loss of explicit memory - deliberately and consciously recalled. Reed & Squire 1989. MRI scans on 4 amnesic all hippo, damage. 2 temporal lobe damage who had severe Retrograde amnesia. Low pop V, no conclusion, no comparison of normal pop. Difficult to generalise. 

 Alzheimer’s, progressive. Impaired memory, thoughts & speech. Plaques and tangles, Amyloid precursor protein broken down into beta amyloid protein 42 = build-up of plaques. Selkoe 2000 plaques start to form before symptoms = problems in the communication between neurones. Build-up of plaque and Alzheimer’s is weak and hard to explain, Murphy & LeVine 2010, presence of β-amyloid protein 42 early in the disease starts a chain of events that leads to the illness, yet to be properly tested. Snyder 2005,  β-amyloid protein 42 interferes with NDMA, NT Alzheimer’s could occur as it is a chemical change which causes your learning to be affected Cleary et al (2005) did an experiment where rats were injected with β-amyloid disrupts memory. Genetic predisposition: Levy-Lahad eta al in 1995 early signs of the Alzheimer’s gene on chromosome 1. Schellenberg et al (1992) chromosome 14 Ertekin-Taner et al 2000 C 10 , not isolated, all genes involved in producung more beta amyloid. St George-Hislop 2000  half of all Alzheimer’s patients have no known relative with disorder = genetic influence is small. 

Korsakoff's, chronic alcoholics, frontal cortex damaged, more impaired than other amnesiacs. Shinamura and Squire 1986. Recall answers to general info Q. Subjects indicated extent to which they felt they knew the answers & recognition memory test for items. Korsakoff’s patients less accurate than those other amnesic patients with other amnesiacs performing as normal controls. They concluded that Korsakoff’s syndrome typically produces a more widespread cognitive deficit than is observed in other forms of amnesia.

Repression: Anderson in 1995, Levinger and Clark (1961) found supporting evidence for Freud’s repression theory of emotional material. The results showed that participants had poorer recall ability for emotionally negative words. When they were asked to give free associations to neutral and negatively-charged words, they tended to have longer response latency for the latter, suggesting that the negative words had been repressed

Fugue state Kopelman described the case of a man who had experienced 10-12 prior fugue episodes, he suffered from depression and claimed that amnesia was to blame for in him causing a road traffic accident when driving disqualified, uninsured and drunk.