Altering traumatic memory

Can you experimentally contaminate memory for truly traumatic events? We investigated this question in a study in which 80 Russian participants reported on their memories for one of two terrorist bombings. Half the participants recalled the 1999 attacks on Moscow apartment buildings while the others recalled the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Participants recalled the events on two separate occasions over a six month period. Just prior to the second recall, we strongly suggested to all participants that they had seen a wounded animal in the attacks and had mentioned it in their original memory reports. While none of the WTC group were convinced by the suggestion, 12.5% of the Moscow group did so, and even elaborated with sensory detail (e.g., a bleeding cat lying in the dust). This group was more susceptible to contamination despite the greater emotion that they experienced about the Moscow terrorist attacks. These findings support the notion that even traumatic memories are experimentally malleable.     

The Effect of Self-awareness on the Identification of Goal-related Obstacles

When individuals strive towards personal goals, they may encounter obstacles that could compromise their goal progress and pose a challenge to self-regulation. Coping with obstacles first requires those obstacles to be identified. The purpose of the present studies was to apply an inter-individual approach to this important, but insufficiently studied self-regulatory aspect of goal striving. We therefore examined the role of self-awareness, that is, paying attention to one's own feelings, thoughts, and behaviours, for the identification of goal-related obstacles. We measured and manipulated self-awareness in two correlational and two experimental studies (one of them preregistered) and asked participants to identify obstacles to their goals. All studies confirmed the hypothesis that individuals with higher levels of dispositional and situational self-awareness identify more obstacles, both with regard to their idiosyncratic personal goals (Studies 1 and 2) and with regard to a goal in an assigned task during an experiment (Studies 3 and 4). The results indicate that self-awareness plays a crucial role for identifying obstacles. We discuss the implications of our findings for personality and self-regulation research.