Discuss How Emotion Can Inhibit Memory

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Discuss how emotion can inhibit memory Emotion can have a strong effect on memory, it can both inhibit and enhance it. When discussing how emotion can inhibit your memory one often hears about Freud’s theory of repression. Repression occurs when one experiences dreadful, sometimes traumatizing events, which can be emotionally arousing. Freud mentioned that it is a way of mental self-defence and is called “motivated forgetting”. His claim indicates that negative and traumatic experiences are more likely to be forgotten than more positive ones, which are more likely to be remembered. Anything that can be forgotten could have been repressed, because we are not comfortable with that idea. There is a tendency to use repression as a defence mechanism. It’s used against negative emotion, which is obtained in childhood and is a response to poor quality relationships with parents. Freud argued that repression didn’t only explain the anxiety disorders of his patients, due to the repression of traumatic experiences, but it was common cause of forgetting something daily. Although this is the case, it is really hard to prove the theory of repression A study, which looked at, can prove that some of Freud’s theory is accurate, was a study conducted by Herman and Schatzow (1987). They managed to show the theory of repressing by verifying that 28% of women who had past experiences of incest in childhood couldn’t remember well giving evidence of repression. A researcher called Williams also found evidence of repression in 1994. He did this by conducting a study where he gathered 129 girls that admitted to hospital in 1970 due to sexual assault and were interviewed 17 years later. The results showed that 38% of the women had no recall of the original incident. Of those who did remember, 16% said that they had at one time been unable to recall the event, but then recovered their

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