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Dissociative Amnesia Research Paper

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Imagine realizing that you can't remember anything that happened in the last week, year, or even who you are. This is what occurs in cases of dissociative amnesia. Dissociative amnesia is a dissociative disorder characterized by the repression of memories due to some kind of stressful event or trauma. Many would associate memory loss with physical brain injury only, but in this essay I argue that many cases of dissociative amnesia are in fact brought on by psychological stress. Two articles were chosen describing psychological studies of the source of dissociative amnesia. The first study, Memory Repression: Brain Mechanisms Underlying Dissociative Amnesia, describes an experiment involving two patients with dissociative amnesia. They were shown three sets of pictures: people they knew and could recognize, people they knew but couldn't remember, and a control of unknown people whom they were asked to name. The experimenters used fMRI to determine which areas of …show more content…
In all of the cases the amnesia stems from emotional trauma over a long period of time or a sudden traumatic event. For example, one patient was unable to remember anything between age 10 to 16 after being abused by her father as a child. Another lost the past six years of his life after a fire broke out in his house (Markowitsch & Staniloiu, 2010). In the other study, one patient was dealing with a stressful work schedule and marriage concerns; the other was in a car accident though he was unhurt (Abe et al., 2009). While an argument could be made that the second patient had a physical trauma which led to his amnesia, the researchers found nothing wrong with him physically and his mind was in good health otherwise. It was found that the right temporo-frontal area of the brain was affected in most of the cases studied due to a wave of stress hormones (Markowitsch & Staniloiu,

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