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What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: Psychological Trauma and Its Relationship to Enhanced Memory Control

Control processes engaged in halting the automatic retrieval of unwanted memories have been shown to reduce the later recallability of the targets of suppression. Like other cognitive skills that benefit from practice, we hypothesized that memory control is similarly experience dependent, such that...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Hulbert, Justin C., Anderson, Michael C.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: American Psychological Association 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6277128/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30024184
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000461
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author Hulbert, Justin C.
Anderson, Michael C.
author_facet Hulbert, Justin C.
Anderson, Michael C.
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description Control processes engaged in halting the automatic retrieval of unwanted memories have been shown to reduce the later recallability of the targets of suppression. Like other cognitive skills that benefit from practice, we hypothesized that memory control is similarly experience dependent, such that individuals with greater real-life experience at stopping retrieval would exhibit better inhibitory control over unwanted memories. Across two experiments, we found that college students reporting a greater history of trauma exhibited more suppression-induced forgetting of both negative and neutral memories than did those in a matched group who had reported experiencing little to no trauma. The association was especially evident on a test of suppression-induced forgetting involving independent retrieval cues that are designed to better isolate the effects of inhibitory control on memory. Participants reporting more trauma demonstrated greater generalized forgetting of suppressed material. These findings raise the possibility that, given proper training, individuals can learn to better manage intrusive experiences, and are broadly consistent with the view that moderate adversity can foster resilience later in life.
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spelling pubmed-62771282018-12-06 What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: Psychological Trauma and Its Relationship to Enhanced Memory Control Hulbert, Justin C. Anderson, Michael C. J Exp Psychol Gen Articles Control processes engaged in halting the automatic retrieval of unwanted memories have been shown to reduce the later recallability of the targets of suppression. Like other cognitive skills that benefit from practice, we hypothesized that memory control is similarly experience dependent, such that individuals with greater real-life experience at stopping retrieval would exhibit better inhibitory control over unwanted memories. Across two experiments, we found that college students reporting a greater history of trauma exhibited more suppression-induced forgetting of both negative and neutral memories than did those in a matched group who had reported experiencing little to no trauma. The association was especially evident on a test of suppression-induced forgetting involving independent retrieval cues that are designed to better isolate the effects of inhibitory control on memory. Participants reporting more trauma demonstrated greater generalized forgetting of suppressed material. These findings raise the possibility that, given proper training, individuals can learn to better manage intrusive experiences, and are broadly consistent with the view that moderate adversity can foster resilience later in life. American Psychological Association 2018-07-19 2018-12 /pmc/articles/PMC6277128/ /pubmed/30024184 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000461 Text en © 2018 The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s). Author(s) grant(s) the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher.
spellingShingle Articles
Hulbert, Justin C.
Anderson, Michael C.
What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: Psychological Trauma and Its Relationship to Enhanced Memory Control
title What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: Psychological Trauma and Its Relationship to Enhanced Memory Control
title_full What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: Psychological Trauma and Its Relationship to Enhanced Memory Control
title_fullStr What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: Psychological Trauma and Its Relationship to Enhanced Memory Control
title_full_unstemmed What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: Psychological Trauma and Its Relationship to Enhanced Memory Control
title_short What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: Psychological Trauma and Its Relationship to Enhanced Memory Control
title_sort what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: psychological trauma and its relationship to enhanced memory control
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6277128/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30024184
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000461
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