...Repression of memories has been a controversial topic that has been argued for many years. Many people support the myth as it has been imposed in many cases, specifically legal convictions. Although researchers have found methods to refute the myth, individuals still belief they have repressed a memory of a traumatic event. This has recently been seen in 2007 in the Colorado vs. Marshall case. Marshall Adam Walker was accused of sexual assault to a seventeen year-old as he claimed that he made three boys pose nude for videos. He was sentenced to 24 to life in prison. One of the boys claimed to recover a repressed memory of the event while watching a movie (“Legal cases (53)”). This student’s claim made an influential impact on the perpetrator’s...
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...Recovering memories after a traumatic experience is a controversial issue that researchers study for a long time and there are opposite opinions on that matter. Some psychologists believe that after having an appalling experience as children, the mind in order to protect us repress these memories and we can only recover them in older age. Others though oppose to this opinion that such experiences can never be forgotten. One question that arises is that if repressed memories can be recovered or are they after years false memories. Having this in mind Richard J. McNally and his colleagues have contacted many studies, in order to examine which are the mechanisms that may be responsible for people to either repress and recover memories of trauma or create false memories of trauma. For their studies they used four groups of women. The first was the “repressed memory” group. In this group, the subjects were women that they thought they had been sexual abused as children but had no memories of it, just some indications. The second group was the “recovered-memory” group. In this group, women said that even though there was a long period of time that they had not thought about their abuse they...
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...This document is under development. Input and suggestions for improvement are welcomed by at this address. This revision: 1997. Your Obligation to the Reader. The author of a book or paper has an obligation to give the reader something beyond what the reader could obtain directly from the source materials. These services to the reader may include: Research and investigate. Seek out obscure and hard-to-find material, and unify it into a clear presentation. Synthesize. Draw together diverse things to show patterns and relations. Organize. Give logical continuity and structure to diverse materials. Analyze. Provide critical analysis in which arguments are examined for evidence, validity, logic, and flaws. Clarify. Make evidence and arguments clearer to the reader. Elucidate difficult material. Examine in a broader context. Show how a specific subject fits into a broader context, relates to another field, or relates to historic precedents. Select and distill. Weed out fluff and irrelevancies to get at the main issues of a complex subject. Adopt a point of view. Show how the preponderance of evidence and reason favors one side in a controversial issue. Research Materials Before sitting down to write you must have ideas, a plan in mind and genuine understanding to communicate. That comes from reading everything you can get your hands on related to your subject. How much? Well, I'd feel a bit insecure writing about anything until I'd digested and understood anywhere...
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...abuse from recovery of memories. Most incident occurred after years of not declaring and only recollected during adulthoods, hence, this post a question - How reliable or accurate is the recovered memories? This recovered memories may only be repressed due to shocking incident and later from the unconscious mind, the memory surface out to the conscious mind side. This theory is the key foundation for psychoanalysis and many psychotherapists have readily accepted ( Bruhn, 1990) Memories We have to know that human mind consists of short-term and long-term memory, in this case, we’re looking at long-term memory which break down into 3 main classes. Procedural memory, is...
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...Recovering memories of childhood abuse. In recent years, the explosion of reports of childhood abuse in men and women has raised questions about the nature of memory for traumatic events, the occurrence of amnesia for childhood abuse, and the validity and accuracy of recovered memories. According to researchers most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them although they may not fully understand or disclose it. However, others argue that repression and dissociation is far from clear, their use has become idiosyncratic, metaphoric, and arbitrary. Many clinicians accept recovered memories of childhood abuse as essentially valid reports of early experiences, and clinical work with recovered memories has proved to be useful in some patients. Recently, however, a number of investigators have questioned the validity of recovered memory of childhood. A heated debate has emerged regarding therapists' role in the retrieval of previously unremembered memories of childhood abuse. However, despite evidence that memory content can be influenced by suggestion, emotional arousal, and personal meaning, the bulk of memory research actually supports the accuracy of memory for the central components of significant events. Research evidence shows that it is not for people who were sexually abused in childhood to experience amnesia and delayed recall for the abuse. And according to this article has shown that over time memory for events can...
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...A Literature Review: Memory Distortions, Repressed Memories, and Autobiographical Memory Psych. 560 June 17, 2013 Prof. Pitt A Literature Review: Memory Distortions, Repressed Memories, and Autobiographical Memory Memory helps to build and shape you into the person that you have become. It allows you to identify people, places that you have been, what things are, when things are supposed to happen or have happened, and it also allows you to piece knowledge together so that you can make perceptions or assumptions as to why things happen the way they do. Your short term memory helps you to recollect things in your present day life while your long term memory stores things for retrieval at a later time. Although you rely on your memory to recount information day to day, there are also instances in which your memory denies retrieval in the way that it was stored or retrieve the information just as you stored it. Memory distortions, repressed, memories, and autobiographical memory each describe different ways in which your memory responds when you try to recall the information. “Memory distortion refers to a memory report that differs from what actually occurred” (Bernstein & Loftus, 2008). Repressed memories occur when traumatic events are unconsciously recorded in the mind as a defense mechanism to avoid anxiety or other issues that might arise from the occasion. Autobiographical memory suggests that a person retains and retrieves information...
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...psychology are E.G Boring, Robert I. Watson and of course Sigmund Freud. There is little mention of females who have contributed to psychology. Why is it that females are not really mentioned in the history of psychology? Females have contributed to the growth of psychology just as men have. A woman that has spent her whole life trying to understand memory is Elizabeth Loftus. We will begin with a short biography and also touch on how she has helped psychology to grow. Elizabeth Loftus was born Elizabeth Fishman on October 16, 1944 to Sidney and Rebecca Fishman in Los Angeles, California (Born, 1997). She was raised in Bel Air with both her parents. Then in 1959 her mother passed away, she had drowned in a swimming pool when Loftus was only 14 years old. Loftus wanted to be a high school math teacher, but after attending a psychology class at UCLA she changed her mind. She continued in school to receive her Bachelors in 1966 in math and psychology. She met Geoffrey Loftus in 1968 while attending graduate school at Stanford, and married him. While attending Stanford she was introduced to the study of long term memory and was very interested in this subject. Loftus got her Masters in 1967. She continued her education at Stanford and got her Ph. D in1970. Then in 1973 Loftus was offered a position as assistant professor at the University of Washington where her husband Geoffrey also worked. In 1991 both Geoffrey and Elizabeth called a quits on their marriage ending...
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...revealed about how the different areas of the human brain support cognitive function. I will also discuss the characteristics of primary memory, the process of memory from perception and retrieval and the unreliability of memory retrieval. Phineas Gage Phineas gage is known as one of the most famous documented cases of brain injury. This brain injury occurred on September 13th, 1848 while Gage was working on the railroad excavating rocks with a tampering rod in the State of Vermont. An explosion occurred on the job-site that caused a tampering rod propelled at an extremely high speed to enter and penetrate Gage’s skull. This tampering rod entered his skull under his left cheek bone and exited through the top of his head; it was later recovered with bits of brain matter and blood on it. The amazing thing is that throughout this horrific accident, Mr. Gage never lost consciousness, in fact, by January of the following year; he had started to live a normal life. However, it was noted that around this time, Mr. Gage was considered to be suffering from some major changes in his personality. What Phineas Gage’s Accident Reveals about Cognitive Functions “Cognition refers to the higher order functions that are needed for learning and interacting with a person's environment. Each human brain is capable of multiple cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, executive functions and language. Each of the cognitive brain functions is highly interconnected, with an exchange of information...
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...field of psychology are interested in various divisions of the human brain due to its elaborate and multifaceted relationship between behavior and the brain. The brain or encephalon can be divided in to a varying number of divisions that are explored by different specialty groups within the field of psychology including biological psychologists, cognitive neuroscientist, cognitive psychologists, neuropsychologists, and general research psychologists. Research performed by different psychology professionals on the brain offers a venue for gaining further understanding of certain conditions such as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer's. This paper concludes by discussing personal reasons for wanting to research memory and the opposing factor of forgetfulness. Part 1: Psychological Interest in the Human Brain Different specialties within the field of psychology are interested in various divisions of the human brain due to its elaborate and multifaceted relationship between behavior and the brain. The first part of this paper will be looking at the divisions of the brain which appeal to research and cognitive psychologists. The second part of the paper will be looking at the division of the brain which this counselor is interested in researching further and the thought process for choosing said particular division. Scientific Interest in the Brain The brain or encephalon can be divided in to a varying number of divisions based on who a person...
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...it(___storage__). To most people, memory is __recall__, the ability to retrieve information not in conscious awareness. To a psychologist, memory is any sign that something learned has been retained. So __recognizing__ or more quickly releasing information also indicates memory. A. Retrieval Cues The process of retrieving a memory follows a similar principle because memories are held in storage by a web of associations, each piece of information interconnected with others. When you encode information such as your surroundings, moods, and seating position, you can trigger your __retrieval cues__. B. Mnemonic Devices Mnemonic devices are a way to encode information into your memory. The association we have with these ways of remembrance help us create associations to to our goal. For example, ROY G.BIV, serves as a mnemonic for learning the light spectrum. C. Priming I. Philosopher-psychologist __William James__ referred to the process of the activation of unconsciously creating particular associations with events as __priming__. The priming effect occurs when people respond faster or more efficiently to an event if a similar event precedes it. II. The context of these memory encoding stimuli and processes can be seen as another type of memory retrieval:__deja vu__ , or being in a context similar to one we’ve been in before that may trigger our previous memories of the event. Memory and Memories: Associated...
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...A Man Without a Memory There is a relationship between learning something and remember it. Clive Wearing do not have this relationship because he suffered a serious infection called encephalitis causing him severe brain damage in several regions of his brain and totally destroyed the hippocampus, which important role is memory formation. In the video “A Man Without a Memory-Clive Wearing”, it talks about how his life and family was affected by him not remembering. This paper will let readers know what specific region of Clive’s brain was damaged which resulted in this memory loss and will also explain how his loss of memory for most things despite his lasting memory for the piano and his wife. This paper will also gives our personal opinion on if we were Clive, what memories would we miss the most and explain how emotions links to memories while given examples to support our answer. Relationship between Learning Something and Remembering It To define the relationship between learning something and remembering it, you must first determine what learning is. Learning is acquiring, constructing, or developing new knowledge or skills. In Bloom's taxonomy of learning, the cognitive domain consists of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (Terry, 2009). With this being said, knowledge (to know something) is to be able to recall the information. Comprehension is to understand the meaning of something. Application is being able to use a concept...
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...Test 2 Notes (Ch. 5,6,7,10) Ch. 5 consciousness- an individuals awareness of external events and internal sensations under a condition of arousal meta cognition- thinking about thinking. The 5 levels of consciousness: Higher-level- highly focused; selective attention Lower-level- automatic processes; little attention, daydreaming Altered States- trauma, drugs, fear, fatigue, meditation, prayer biorhythms- are periodic physiological fluctuations in the body. Circadian rhythms- daily behavioral or physiological cycles (exs: sleep/wake, body temp, blood sugar, and blood pressure). Why we need sleep: For physical restoration, adaptation, growth, and memory. What it does for us: Sleep rests the body and mind. The effects of chronic sleep deprivation: Have trouble paying attention to tasks and solving problems, decreases brain activity. The 5 stages of sleep: Stage 1: drowsy sleep; myoclanic jerk; (theta waves) Stage 2: Muscle activity decreases Stage 3 & 4: delta waves; deep sleep Stage 5: (REM) dreaming occurs (Rapid Eye Movement) Major sleep disorders: insomnia- inability to sleep Nightmares- occur during REM Night Terrors- occur in kids, during stage 4 Narcolepsy- sudden urge to sleep Sleep Apnea- stop breathing during sleep Psychoactive drugs- act on the nervous system to alter states of consciousness, modify perceptions and change moods. Tolerance- the need to take increasing amounts of a drug to get the same effect physical dependence- the physiological...
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...1. Is there such a thing as ESP? There may be no topic in psychology quite as controversial, or as fascinating, as extrasensory perception, or ESP. There are three forms of ESP that psychologists study: 1. Telepathy- transfer of information from one person to another without known mediation of sensory communication, 2. Clairvoyance- acquisition of information about places, people, or events without mediation of known senses, and 3. Precognition- acquisition of a future event that could not be anticipated through any known processes of inference. In a study of telepathy, or psi(link is external), for example, participants are seated in two separate rooms; while one “transmits” signals, the other attempts to “receive” them. However, critics argue that many of the effects demonstrated in ESP experiments can simply be explained by faulty methodology and sensory “leakage” in which participants inadvertently give away the answers. The only extra-sensory feature of ESP would be, if this were true, the fact that people who can perform feats involving ESP are actually very good at reading people’s very subtle signals. 2. Why do we dream? Our dreams mystify us and often leave us waking up confused, disoriented, frightened, or perhaps very, very satisfied. Freud, of course, proposed that our dreams represent unconscious wishes that we’re afraid to express in our waking life. The most recent explanations aren’t totally incompatible with this theory. According to the activation-synthesis...
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...MEMORY: REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS TO EDUCATION INTRODUCTION: Memory is generally defined as the processes of encoding, storing and retrieving information. These three processes interact with different memory systems. The memory systems that appear to be most important in the educational area are short-term memory, working memory and long-term memory. Memory is thought to begin with the encoding or converting of information into a form that can be stored by the brain. This encoding process is also referred to as registering information in memory. The memory systems that are involved in the encoding or registration of information in memory are sensory memory and short-term memory. Sensory Memory Information which first comes to us through our senses is stored for a very short period of time within the sensory register. Simply put, the sensory register is associated with our five senses – seeing (visual), hearing (auditory), doing (kinesthetic), feeling (tactile) and smelling (olfactory). However, the sensory buffers that have received the most attention in the research literature are the visual and auditory sensory registers. Generally information remains in our visual memory for a very short time, approximately several hundred milliseconds. This information or "image" is somewhat like an exact replica of what we have just seen, and it fades with the passage of time (Pashler and Carrier, 1996). Short-term Memory Most of the information that enters...
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...1) Explicit memory is a memory that can be intentionally and consciously remembered. With implicit memory, is a functional form of memory that cannot be consciously recalled. 2) An example of explicit memory would be learning a new topic in school and reciting the information the next day. An example of implicit memory is hearing and recognizing a song and singing it. 3) An example of context dependent memory is when you lose an item and recall where you left it. 4) By characterizing good feelings with studying is a good way of helping to recall the information, for example someone who likes chocolate, could eat It while they study in turn helping them recall the information. 5) An example of proactive interference would be someone getting...
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