Not able to retrieve a memory due to emotionally threatening material being repressed or held from conscious awareness.
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What did Freud suggest?
Suggested that anxiety-causing material may be repressed as an ego-defence mechanism to protect us.
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What did Freud believe?
Freud believed that theses repressed memories continue to affect conscious thought, desire and action even though there is no conscious memory of the traumatic event.
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What is motivational forgetting?
When anxiety caused by the memory in some way represses it from conscious thought to protect us.
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What is a disadvantage of Freud's theory?
Hard to test Freud's theory to prove/disprove validity of the concept of repressed memories so it lacks falsifiability.
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What is another disadvantage of Freud's theory?
It's unacceptable to create traumatic or stressful events in a lab to see if they are repressed, so it raises ethical issues.
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What did Loftus et al. (1995) say about therapists?
Therapists may be planting “false memories” which can be done quite easily as people’s memories are very malleable (Loftus et al. 1995) so reduces validity.
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Who supported Freud's theory?
Levinger & Clark’s (1961) study supports repression as an emotional factor in forgetting.
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What did they do?
P’s told to give free associations to both neutral and negative emotionally charged words. Shortly after the p’s were given the words again and asked to recall their associations.
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What did they find & conclude?
Emotional words also produced a higher galvanic skin response (GSR) – a measure of emotional arousal. Repression slowed the p’s recall of associations with emotionally charged words.
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Card 2
Front
What did Freud suggest?
Back
Suggested that anxiety-causing material may be repressed as an ego-defence mechanism to protect us.
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