“Psychologists in Denmark may have hammered the final nail into the coffin containing ‘repression’ – the idea, made popular by psychoanalysis, that negative, emotional memories are particularly prone to be being locked up out of conscious reach.
Simon Nørby and his colleagues at the University of Copenhagen presented dozens of undergrad participants with word pairs, each made up of a cue word and an unrelated target word. Past research has suggested that people are able to deliberately forget some target words while remembering others. But this has been over very short time periods. Nørby’s team wanted to test the effects of deliberate forgetting over a longer time period – a week – and they also wanted to revisit the question of whether emotional words can be deliberately forgotten as easily, or more easily, than neutral words. Past research has suggested they can, but these studies have tended to block emotional word pairs altogether in series of themed trials, thus raising the possibility that their impact may have been diminished by habituation. Norby’s team avoided this problem by jumbling up neutral and emotional words altogether.”
Read more at BPS Research Digest
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It doesn’t really debunk repression, does it?
Graham
- yes it does – Phillis
Er… I’m not sure where the ‘pseudoscience’ is here – do you mean the idea of repression, or this experiment? Surely the latter, because I don’t see how this investigation debunks anything except the ability to remember certain words on command. As posters on the original site have already noted, and to take a completely arbitrary example, not being able to remember the word ‘massacre’ is surely a completely different thing to blocking out the experience of an actual massacre… Similarly, how were the participants’ potentially disparate reactions to ‘emotional’ and ‘non-emotional’ words taken into account? That is to say, a ‘terrible’ word might actually have a positive connotation for the participant (if, for instance, they had heard a particularly good joke that involved incest. Um…)
so repression is now just denial?
So, the best way of not thinking about something is to avoid trying not to think about it….or, forget about it but don’t try too hard or else you will remember it even more than if you weren’t bothered by it.
if anybody wants me, I’ll be in the corner, rocking back and forth.
@ Phillis – no it doesn’t.
Perhaps, if there were equally horrific circumstances to some of the test-cases, this research could have merit. Of course such a study would be decried as inhumane, and torture – as it should be. But without the proper circumstances around – how can someone take such a tame test and try to apply it to such a volatile subject. Maybe meta-analysis would be more appropriate.
Psychoanalysis is a load of bongos.
Ehehehe .. at times it’s pretty funny … this type of research. Why they need to go to such type of systems to see that type of things???
See inside, all answers are there. If you can’t see to the inside … you might be in the wrong position (more a patient yourself, so getting paid for something you should not get paid for ..).
The therapists thereiselfes sound at times more like the ones that repress life itself while being with their patients .. talking about stuff that is not life, giving patients false hope. It’s not the patient him/herself that did have that false hope .. society makes them belief that there is another world .. that there is something not normal about them. In general that is.
Repression .. We do forget for no reason at all quite often.
It’s very nice to see a science piece taken from a seemingly thorough research blog rather than from the Guardian. From looking at the source post, they’ve actually done a fairly complete writeup of the experiment. I appreciate that. I’m not sure I would say that this study singlehandedly “debunks repression”, but it does provide support against it. However I disagree with the authors’ interpretation of the suppression rebound effect. Memory for ‘to be forgotten’ neutral words deteriorated less because they were already remembered less at the baseline test.
The original study that supposedly supported memory suppression has always been strongly criticized anyway, so it’s good to see some evidence come out against it.
Love the hard-core psychology studies. Please keep it up.
I might be wrong – but forget that part – but I think the existence of repressed memory is defended by the theory that the brain actually stores everything in the first place and is never lost, just is not easily recalled. Yi Zhong of Beijing’s Tsinghua University has this year shown a protein that erases short term memories – in order to be replaced by new ones, especially large amounts of information, perhaps implying repressed memories are more created than recalled.
Much as I’m wary of the whole concept of repression, I don’t think this was a very good study to provide evidence against it. As others have pointed out, surely the fact that this was about ‘emotional’ words rather than concepts which are traumatic to the participant (I mean, sure, the word massacre may have some emotional connotation but I don’t lose any sleep over hearing it) means you’re working with different variables, in that when the to-be-suppressed memory is *actually* traumatic, you can expect a different mental process going on.