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.
“When you’re watching the news on television and
see footage of wounded soldiers in Iraq or ongoing coverage
of national tragedies, it may stick with you more than a newspaper
headline,” said the study’s lead author, Keith Payne,
an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts
and Sciences.
It is adaptive to be able to intentionally forget neutral events
such as wrong directions, a friend’s outdated phone number
or a switched meeting time. Intentional forgetting helps update
memory with new information, Payne said.
But Payne and former psychology graduate student Elizabeth
Corrigan found that even “mild” emotional events,
like getting a bad grade on a test or a negative comment from
a coworker, can be hard to forget. Their study, “Emotional
constraints on intentional forgetting,” appears in the
September 2007 print issue of the Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology.
When people are trying to intentionally forget information,
they need to mentally segregate that information and then block
off the information they don’t want to retrieve, Payne
said.
Emotion undermines both of those steps. “You make a lot
of connections between emotional events and other parts of your
life, so it might be difficult to isolate them. As far as blocking
retrieval of an unwanted event, emotion makes events very salient
and therefore highly accessible,” Payne said.
Their results contrast with previous studies of emotional events
and intentional forgetting, but those studies used emotion-laden
words as stimuli, like “death” and “sex.”
The UNC study took a new approach, asking 218 participants to
react to photographs instead of text.
“The word ‘murder,’ for instance, may or may
not make you afraid, but if you see a graphic, violent picture,
it may be powerful enough emotionally to change the way you
feel,” Payne said.
The researchers found that their subjects could not intentionally
forget emotional events as easily as mundane ones. They also
found that both pleasant and unpleasant emotional memories were
resistant to intentional forgetting.
The UNC findings contribute to understanding the ways that
emotion constrains mental control and to the question of whether
intentional forgetting can be helpful in coping with painful
or traumatic experiences.
“Our findings add to accumulating evidence that emotion
places limits on the ability to control the contents of the
mind,” Payne said. “Our results suggest that even
a relatively mild emotional reaction can undermine intentional
forgetting. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that emotional
memories can never be intentionally forgotten. If the motivation
to forget is powerful enough, individuals might be able to overcome
the effects of emotion by enlisting additional coping strategies.”
A different study would be needed to examine what treatment
and coping strategies might be effective in helping people voluntarily
forget an unwanted memory, he added.
