Week 6: Diving Into The Readings

This week I started reading the materials I have picked out for the first topic area to explore, which is learning about the psychology behind our memories.

Learnings from Readings

To be completely honest, after going through almost all of the reading resources I have listed previously, most of them are not even close to what I need to learn about the topic. I think the reason being most are scientific journals rather than scholarly journals. I find scientific journals to be too specific for my case in learning about the topic, so I decided to find new sources for my first topic area, possibly for the rest of the topic areas as well. The following are some notes I highlighted from each scholarly journals so that I can use them when writing my dissertation later on.

1. “Memories Warm You Up from the Inside. But They also Tear You Apart”: Editorial for the Special Issue on Memory Training for Emotional Disorders by Eni Becker

• Our memory is in a way our essence, defines and shapes us
• Memory is quite changeable, elusive even, and thus our past is changing all the time
• Memory is essential for us as human beings. It is essential because it is such a big part of our sense of ‘self’. In fact, philosopher John Locke believed that a continuity of consciousness and memory establishes the ‘self’ over time
• They drive what we do and how we feel, both contributing to adaptive healthy behavior and optimism but also resulting in sadness, fear and destructive behavior
• The episodic long term memory contains our autobiographical memory as well as the semantic memory
• There is good evidence for a selective memory bias in depression, depressed participants showing ‘mood-congruent’ memory bias, meaning that negative episodic and/or autobiographical information gets recalled more efficiently and frequently
• Individuals with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but also other psychological disorders, retrieve overgeneral memories when attempting to retrieve memories of specific events
• Creating false memories is a major threat but that memory is changeable can also be seen as a chance: We can ‘change’ our past, and thus, change the present and possibly the future

2. “Autobiographical Memory for Stressful Events, Traumatic Memory and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Systematic Review” by Longhi Lorenzzoni, Thiago Loreto Gacia Silva, Mariana Pasquali Poletto, Christian Haag Kristensen

• Overgeneralization is the phenomenon referred to as on how much a memory is vague or unspecific when a subject is enquired to remember about an event in his life
• This phenomenon can be maintained by negative reinforcement as an avoidance strategy of disturbed emotions
• Overgeneralization is one of the most studied AM phenomena since the work that was carried out by Williams and Broadbent (1986), evaluating the memory of suicidal patients and perceiving that these patients had a tendency to recollect their own past in an overgeneralized manner
• Memories regarding the event are presented in a fragmented and inconsistent way
• Such characteristic relates to the subject’s autobiographical narrative, which is built while recovering the individual’s memory on trauma. Therefore, such a narrative is possibly vague and poorly organized, containing faults and discontinuities

3. “The Mental Regulation of Autobiographical Recollection in the Aftermath of Trauma” by Tim Dalgleish, Beatrijs Hauer and Willem Kuyken

• Other negative autobiographical material is also rendered more accessible in distressed individuals who have tried to suppress a target memory
• When individuals who are markedly distressed try to avoid a target upsetting memory by distracting themselves with thoughts of other things, the other things that most readily come to mind are themselves likely both to be negatively valanced and to include personal memories, as a result of mood-congruent memory (Blaney, 1986)
• Attempted suppression is generally a counterproductive approach to the regulation of traumatic memories in distressed trauma survivors. Working with trauma memories, rather than suppressing them, is more adaptive

4. “Hidden Wounds? Inflammatory Links Between Childhood Trauma and Psychopathology” by Andrea Danese and Jessie Baldwin

• Little is known about how exposure to childhood trauma is translated into biological risk for psychopathology
• These “hidden wounds” of childhood trauma can affect brain development, key behavioral domains (e.g., cognition, positive valence systems, negative valence systems), reactivity to subsequent stressors, and, ultimately, risk for psychopathology
• The symptoms were caused by the idea of the trauma — the subjective perception of intensely distressing experiences — which triggered psychological and physical manifestations (hysteria)
• Childhood trauma comes from investigations of the consequences of childhood maltreatment, a prototypical form of severe and chronic interpersonal stress that includes sexual, physical, and emotional abuse as well as physical and emotional neglect
• Childhood maltreatment is associated with increased risk for incident posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with symptoms including emotional dysregulation, poor self-concept, and disturbed relationships
• Early-life exposure to stressful experiences can cause significant emotional and behavioral abnormalities later in life