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3. Speakers and Organizers
Invited Speakers
 Title:THE ENHANCING EFFECT OF EMOTION ON MEMORY ENCODING AND RETRIEVAL: FUNCTIONAL NEUROIMAGING EVIDENCE
Florin Dolcos, Kevin LaBar, and Roberto Cabeza, Duke University, USA
cabeza@duke.edu
 Abstract
Emotional events are usually remembered better than neutral events. The anatomical and functional correlates of this phenomenon have been investigated with different approaches ranging from behavioral and pharmacological to electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging. The chapter will review this evidence focusing in particular on functional neuroimaging studies. These studies have examined the effects of emotion on memory-related activity during both encoding and retrieval, and have clarified the role of the amygdala, the medial temporal lobes, the prefrontal cortex, and other brain regions. Functional neuroimaging studies are also exploring emotional memory mechanisms in populations with emotional (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder, depression) and memory (e.g., aging and dementia) disorders. The chapter will end with a discussion of open issues and future directions.
Title:Violent events and effects of trauma on memory.
Sven A Christianson and Elisabeth Engelberg, Stockholm University, Sweden
scn@psychology.su.se
Abstract
Please see the TIC6 Program for details.
Title:MEMORIES OF TRAUMA
Gail Goodman and Pedro Paz Alonso, University of California, Davis, USA
ggoodman@ucdavis.edu
Abstract
There is much scientific interest in memory for trauma. The theoretical issues at stake are fundamental to an understanding of the human mind. In addition, legal cases have sparked debates about how trauma affects memory. For example, does the trauma of an event lead to more durable memories? Or, is it possible to repress memories of adult or child trauma, only to have the memories unlocked later? How malleable is human memory for trauma material? For distressing information, are there important individual differences, such as in personality or psychopathology, that affect memory accuracy and susceptibility to false memory? What memory mechanisms underlie memory for trauma? Our research addresses these questions. A review of relevant literature, with a focus on our studies, will be provided. It will be concluded that an understanding of individual differences in the processing of trauma holds the key to a science of trauma and memory.
Title:THE TRAUMA-MEMORY ARGUMENT REVISITED
John Kihlstrom, University of California, Berkeley, USA
kihlstrm@socrates.berkeley.edu
Abstract
Since the 19th century, clinical folklore has embraced the notion that psychological trauma can cause amnesia. After a review of early concepts of repression (Freud) and dissociation (Janet), modern expressions of the trauma-memory argument, which provide the basis for recovered-memory therapy, are critically examined. In some cases, the theory is found wanting in terms of internal coherence. But, crucially, in all cases, the theories lack external empirical support. Retrospective studies which claim to provide evidence of traumatic amnesia are methodologically flawed, and prospective studies have yielded no convincing cases of amnesia that cannot be accounted for by age, retention interval, or organic factors. In view of the lack of evidence for trauma-induced psychogenic or functional amnesia, the trauma-memory argument appears to be a theory in search of a phenomenon.
Title:ARE WE FRIGHTENED BECAUSE WE RUN AWAY? SOME EVIDENCE FROM METACOGNITIVE FEELINGS
Asher Koriat, University of Haifa, Israel
akoriat@research.haifa.ac.il
Abstract
William James raised the question whether we run away from a bear because we are frightened or we are frightened because we are running away. This issue will be addressed with regard to the relationship between metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control. While current views hold that the subjective experience of knowing drives controlled action, evidence will be presented suggesting that feelings of knowing may themselves be based on the feedback from controlled action, and thus follow rather than precede behavior. On the other hand, evidence also suggests that subjective experience can drive behavior. Focusing on self-paced learning, it will be shown that in some conditions the effort spent studying new material is determined by our judgments of learning, but in other conditions these judgments are actually based on the amount of effort spent. An attempt will be made to specify the conditions under which each of the causal relations occurs.
Title:BEYOND GENERAL AROUSAL: EMOTIONAL VALENCE, DISCRETE EMOTIONS, AND MEMORY
Linda Levine, University of California, Irvine, USA
llevine@uci.edu
Abstract
A great deal of research on emotion and memory has focused on the question of whether emotion enhances memory. Based on this research, investigators have variously claimed that emotional memories are indelible; that emotion has no special effects on memory at all; and that emotion leads to enhanced memory for either congruent or central information. In this presentation, I will review the current status of these claims. Although considerable progress has been made toward understanding whether and how emotion enhances memory, much of this research has been limited by its treatment of emotion as merely "arousal." I will argue that a more complete understanding of the effects of emotion on memory depends upon taking into account the differing motivations and problem-solving strategies associated with discrete emotions. Evidence will be presented that people process and remember information differently depending upon whether they are feeling happy, fearful, angry, or sad.
Title:EMOTIONS, MEMORY AND THE BRAIN: THE INFLUENCE OF STRESS AND BRAIN DISEASE ON AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY RETRIEVAL
Hans Markowitsch, University Bielefeld, Germany
hjmarkowitsch@uni-bielefeld.de
Abstract
Tulving defined episodic-autobiographical memory as the conjunction of subjective time, autonoetic consciousness and the experiencing self. The components of this definition also refer to an emotional evaluation of past memories when re-experiencing them during retrieval. While this process of re-instating a complex past episode during retrieval works satisfactorily in most situations, subjects with memory impairments due to organic brain damage, psychogenic or psychosomatic stress and trauma situations, or subjects under constraining environmental conditions may manifest severe impairments in retrieving their personal past. For the organic condition, patients will be described who after amygdala damage due to Urbach-Wiethe disease show impairments in properly evaluating emotional information. For the psychogenic condition, data from patients with several forms of dissociative amnesias will be presented and it will be concluded that psychic stress and trauma conditions can lead to a so-called mnestic block syndrome, which results in a failure to retrieve episodes from the personal past. Functional imaging correlates of this environmentally induced selective amnesic condition underline its severity. Finally, examples of experimentally induced false memories will be used to stress the idea that autobiographical memories are particularly vulnerable due to their affect-related embedding, requiring a synchronous activation of both cognitive and emotional components for their retrieval.
Title:AGING AND EMOTIONAL MEMORY
Mara Mather, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
mather@ucsc.edu
Abstract
Recent findings reveal that older adults remember in more emotionally gratifying ways than younger adults, possibly because of the increased focus on regulating current emotion with age. Older adults avoid negative information in their initial attention and show less activation in brain regions associated with emotional attention when seeing negative pictures than positive pictures. On memory tests, they show positivity biases, forgetting negative information more than positive information and distorting autobiographical information in a positive direction. Reminding younger adults of emotional goals by asking them to reflect on their current feelings leads them to show the same memory biases as older adults. In addition, older adults who do well on tests of executive function are those most likely to show positivity biases in memory. Thus, these age-related changes seem to be due to changes in goals rather than to cognitive decline.
Title:ANXIETY AND THE ENCODING OF EMOTIONAL INFORMATION
Andrew Mathews, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Units, UK
Andrew.mathews@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
Abstract
Memory for emotional events tends to be better than for neutral events. Despite this, individual differences in anxiety are not reliably associated with better recall of congruent (threatening) information. Better memory for threatening information sometimes occurs in anxious individuals but depends on the selective use of emotional encoding processes, rather than retrieval differences. Anxiety is associated with an attentional focus on threatening picture content, which is then remembered as if seen from a closer perspective. Neuro-imaging data suggests that such selective encoding strategies can be modified by instructions, but this control is more difficult for highly anxious individuals. Other evidence shows that better control over the encoding of emotional meaning can be achieved by training in the interpretation of emotional events. As well as demonstrating control of emotional encoding this evidence shows that selective encoding is a cause, rather than just a consequence of emotion.
Title:MEMORY FOR EMOTIONAL EPISODES: THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITS OF AROUSAL-BASED ACCOUNTS
Daniel Reisberg, Reed College, USA
reisberg@reed.edu
Abstract
Both psychological and neuroscience data confirm the claim that emotional arousal improves memory, so that emotional events are, overall, better remembered than emotionally neutral (but otherwise comparable) events. In addition, the biological mechanisms underlying this effect are reasonably well understood - in both the neurocircuitry and in psychopharmacology. For these reasons, we must take seriously an arousal-based account of how emotional events are remembered. However, an arousal-based account is also limited in crucial ways. Some of these limits concern the notion of arousal itself; other limits are tied to complexities in how different levels of arousal influence memory. Still other limits involve other factors beyond arousal that also influence memory completeness and accuracy. These factors include the ways in which people pay attention to the various aspects of an emotional event, and also distinctions among different types of emotional events, distinctions that have important implications for how these events are remembered.
Title:MEMORY AND EMOTION IN PERSONALITY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
Jefferson Singer, Connecticut College, USA
Jefferson.singer@conncoll.edu
Abstract
In the last two decades, personality psychologists and clinical psychologists have displayed a renewed interest in autobiographical memory. Drawing on burgeoning research in cognitive psychology on autobiographical memory as well as advances in emotion research, personality psychologists have identified certain key emotional memories as integrative units of the self that combine both episodic and semantic information. These self-defining memories are linked to important life goals and also play a critical role in mood regulation. In addition, they provide significant opportunities for lesson-learning and meaning-making that contribute to an individual's sense of purpose and identity. More recently, clinical psychologists have begun to draw on self-defining memories as a focus of intervention in both individual and couples psychotherapy. This talk reviews laboratory studies of self-defining memories and then provides case examples of their application in psychotherapy.
Title:AGE-RELATED CHANGES IN ENCODING AND RETRIEVAL OF EMOTIONAL VS. NON-EMOTIONAL INFORMATION
Bob Uttl and Peter Graf, University of Tsukuba, Japan ; University of British Columbia, Canada
Abstract
A large body of research has demonstrated substantial age-related declines in explicit episodic memory that are most pronounced in adults over 60 years of age. However, like the detective in the popular police drama Dragnet, the vast majority of research has asked for "just the facts, ma'am," focusing on memory for words, objects, and their attributes but ignoring memory for other aspects of episodes such as emotional information. The aims of our research were (1) to investigate whether older adults' explicit episodic memory for emotional information declines in the same way as memory for non-emotional information and (2) to find out whether age-related differences in memory for both emotional and non-emotional information can be explained by age-related differences in encoding. Our findings indicate that in contrast to memory for "just the facts", memory for emotional information does not decline across the adult life span.
Organizers
Nobuo Ohta, University of Tsukuba
nobohta@human.tsukuba.ac.jp
Bob Uttl, University of Tsukuba
bob.uttl@human.tsukuba.ac.jp
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