Motives matter: The emotional consequences of recalled self- and other- focused prosocial acts

Past research has demonstrated that engaging in and reflecting upon past instances of prosocial behavior promote happiness. Yet, people provide help for a myriad of reasons. Do the motives for giving impact its emotional consequences? In three experiments (N?>?680), we compared the emotional outcomes of recalling a past instance of prosocial behavior motivated by self-focused and other-focused concerns. Using both between and within subjects designs, we find that recalling an instance of other-focused helping leads to higher positive affect than recalling an instance of self-focused helping. This finding was mediated by feelings of morality. The present work suggests that not all acts of kindness offer equivalent well-being benefits and that selfish motives may undermine the emotional rewards that typically follow other-focused prosocial behavior.     

Constraints on the processing of indirect speech acts: evidence from aphasiology

The ability of anterior aphasics and patients with right-hemisphere damage to comprehend both the literal and nonliteral readings of indirect speech acts was examined. Subjects viewed videotaped episodes in which one actor asked another “Can you X?” and the second actor responded with either an action or a simple “Yes.” Subjects judged whether the response was appropriate given its context. Anterior aphasics could comprehend the nonliteral but not the literal reading, supporting models that posit that people have direct access to nonliteral but conventional readings. Patients with right-hemisphere damage could appreciate the direct reading, but failed to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate action-responses. This finding suggests that it may be possible to dissociate the pragmatic and syntactic aspects of comprehension of indirect speech acts.     

Playing prosocial video games increases the accessibility of prosocial thoughts

Past research has provided abundant evidence that playing violent video games increases aggressive tendencies. In contrast, evidence on possible positive effects of video game exposure on prosocial tendencies has been relatively sparse. The present research tested and found support for the hypothesis that exposure to prosocial video games increases the accessibility of prosocial thoughts. These results provide support to the predictive validity of the General Learning Model (Buckley & Anderson, 2006) for the effects of exposure to prosocial media on social tendencies. Thus, depending on the content of the video game, playing video games can harm but may also benefit social relations.     

Language structure in social interaction: perceptions of direct and indirect speech acts and interactants who use them

Speech acts (Searle, 1975) can be performed either directly or in various indirect ways. It is argued that the appropriateness of this choice is affected by the process of face management and the relative status of the speaker, and the choice of how to perform speech acts will encode social information. A written scenario format was used, and in Experiment 1, subjects rated direct and indirect questions and replies as a function of the status of the target interactants, and the extent to which the requested information was face threatening. Perceptions of the appropriateness of replies, but not the questions, varied as a function of face threat. The effects of status were in the predicted direction for both questions and replies, but significant only for the perceived politeness of questions. Subjects in Experiment 2 rated the scenario interactants and their relationships as a function of the use of direct and indirect replies and rated possible rejoinders to these replies. Inferences of status, liking, and closeness varied as a function of the reply type used, and indirect replies were more likely to be accepted than to be questioned when there was an obvious reason for their use (i.e., to manage face).     

The properties of retrieval cues constrain the picture superiority effect

In three experiments, we examined why pictures are remembered better than words on explicit memory tests like recall and recognition, whereas words produce more priming than pictures on some implicit tests, such as word-fragment and word-stem completion (e.g., completing -l-ph-nt or ele----- as elephant). One possibility is that pictures are always more accessible than words if subjects are given explicit retrieval instructions. An alternative possibility is that the properties of the retrieval cues themselves constrain the retrieval processes engaged; word fragments might induce data-driven (perceptually based) retrieval, which favors words regardless of the retrieval instructions. Experiment 1 demonstrated that words were remembered better than pictures on both the word-fragment and word-stem completion tasks under both implicit and explicit retrieval conditions. In Experiment 2, pictures were recalled better than words with semantically related extralist cues. In Experiment 3, when semantic cues were combined with word fragments, pictures and words were recalled equally well under explicit retrieval conditions, but words were superior to pictures under implicit instructions. Thus, the inherently data-limited properties of fragmented words limit their use in accessing conceptual codes. Overall, the results indicate that retrieval operations are largely determined by properties of the retrieval cues under both implicit and explicit retrieval conditions.     

Implementation intentions and the willful pursuit of prosocial goals in negotiations

Three studies examined whether the self-regulation strategy of forming implementation intentions (i.e., if-then plans) facilitates the attainment of prosocial goals when a limited resource is to be distributed between two parties who hold adverse cognitive orientations. In three experiments, pairs of negotiators were assigned prosocial goals that either had to be supplemented with plans (if-then plans, Gollwitzer, 1999) on how to act on these goals or not. Experiment 1 used a mixed-frames negotiation paradigm in which one negotiation partner operated on a gain-frame, the other on a loss-frame. When participants had the prosocial goal to find fair agreements and furnished it with a respective if-then plan, unfair agreements in favor of the loss-frame negotiator no longer occurred. Experiment 2 used a same-frame negotiation paradigm, where both negotiation partners had either a loss or a gain-frame. When loss-frame pairs had furnished their prosocial goals to cooperate with the negotiation partner with a respective if-then plan, reduced profits as compared to gain-frame pairs of negotiators were no longer observed. In addition, negotiators who had formed implementation intentions were more likely to use the integrative negotiation strategy of logrolling (i.e., making greater concessions on low rather than high priority issues). Experiment 3 used a computer-mediated negotiation task in order to analyze the effects of prosocial goals and respective implementation intentions on the course of the negotiation. Again, implementation intentions facilitated the pursuit of prosocial goals in the face of adversity (i.e., loss frames) by use of the integrative negotiation strategy of logrolling. The present research adds a self-regulation perspective to the research on negotiation by pointing out that the effects of negotiation goals can be enhanced by furnishing them with respective plans (i.e., implementation intentions).     

Socio-cognitive influences on the domain-specificity of prosocial behavior in the second year

The main aim of this study was to explain the domain-specificity of early prosocial behavior in different domains (i.e., helping, comforting, and cooperation) by simultaneously assessing specific socio-cognitive factors (i.e., self-other-differentiation and joint attentional skills) that were hypothesized to be differentially related to the three domains of prosocial behavior. Based on a longitudinal study design, observational and parental report data were collected when toddlers (N = 42) from German urban middle-class families were 15 and 18 months of age. At 15 months, regression analyses indicated differential relationships between socio-cognitive development and prosocial behavior (i.e., joint attentional skills were positively related with helping and, as hypothesized, both joint attentional skills and self-other differentiation were positively related with cooperation). Furthermore, self-other differentiation at 15 months predicted increases in coordination between 15 and 18 months. Finally, between 15 and 18 months, parental reports of socio-cognitive measures increased significantly while behavioral measures of both socio-cognitive concepts and prosocial behavior were stable across time. In sum, these results support the theoretical assumption of domain-specific socio-cognitive influences that constitute differential development of prosocial behavior. Implications of the results for theory and future studies are discussed from different perspectives with a focus on an interference interpretation calling for the integration of socialization approaches to the study of prosocial development.     

Abstract construals make the emotional rewards of prosocial behavior more salient

Although previous research has shown that helping others leads to higher happiness than helping oneself, people frequently predict that self-serving behavior will make them happier than prosocial behavior. Here, we explore whether abstract construal – thinking about an event from a higher level, distanced perspective – influences predictions about how rewarding prosocial actions will be for people’s own well-being. In Experiment 1, Hurricane Katrina volunteers who adopted an abstract construal predicted that their efforts would be more rewarding than did volunteers who adopted a concrete construal. Experiment 2 provided a conceptual replication with a hypothetical donation scenario; people who adopted an abstract rather than concrete construal predicted that giving more money would be more rewarding than giving less. These findings suggest that people are more likely to appreciate the emotional benefits of prosocial actions when they adopt high-level construals than when they adopt low-level construals.     

Four experiments on the relational dynamics and prosocial consequences of gratitude

Abstract

Four experiments utilized experimental inductions of gratitude and behavioral measures of prosociality to explore the effects of 4 variables on gratitude and grateful prosocial outcomes: benefactor similarity (Study 1), intention (Study 2), future benefits (Study 3), and anonymity (Study 4). We consistently found that the receipt of a favor increased prosocial behavior, and this effect was mediated by gratitude. Benefactor similarity did not meaningfully influence either prosocial behavior or gratitude. Although benefactor intention did meaningfully affect gratitude, the effect was too small to influence the mediational effect of gratitude on prosocial behavior. Neither anonymity nor the possibility of future procurement decreased the role of gratitude in distribution; instead, both of these variables may have enhanced the role of gratitude. These data support gratitude as an important component of prosocial behavior and suggest that gratitude may contain an altruistic component, consistent with its relational function.     

Phonological phrase boundaries constrain the online syntactic analysis of spoken sentences

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien mort], in English, the dead little dog, vs. [le petit chien] [mord], in English, the little dog bites, where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). An expert speaker recorded the sentences with either a maximally informative prosody or a minimally informative one. Participants correctly assigned the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, even without any access to the lexical disambiguating information, in both a completion task (Experiment 1) and an abstract word detection task (Experiment 2). The size of the experimental effect was modulated by the prosodic manipulation (maximally vs. minimally informative), guaranteeing that prosody played a crucial role in disambiguation. The authors discuss the implications of these results for models of online speech perception and language acquisition.     

Social power facilitates the effect of prosocial orientation on empathic accuracy

Power increases the tendency to behave in a goal-congruent fashion. Guided by this theoretical notion, we hypothesized that elevated power would strengthen the positive association between prosocial orientation and empathic accuracy. In 3 studies with university and adult samples, prosocial orientation was more strongly associated with empathic accuracy when distinct forms of power were high than when power was low. In Study 1, a physiological indicator of prosocial orientation, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, exhibited a stronger positive association with empathic accuracy in a face-to-face interaction among dispositionally high-power individuals. In Study 2, experimentally induced prosocial orientation increased the ability to accurately judge the emotions of a stranger but only for individuals induced to feel powerful. In Study 3, a trait measure of prosocial orientation was more strongly related to scores on a standard test of empathic accuracy among employees who occupied high-power positions within an organization. Study 3 further showed a mediated relationship between prosocial orientation and career satisfaction through empathic accuracy among employees in high-power positions but not among employees in lower power positions. Discussion concentrates upon the implications of these findings for studies of prosociality, power, and social behavior.     

Making context memories independent of the hippocampus

We present evidence that certain learning parameters can make a memory, even a very recent one, become independent of the hippocampus. We confirm earlier findings that damage to the hippocampus causes severe retrograde amnesia for context memories, but we show that repeated learning sessions create a context memory that is not vulnerable to the damage. The findings demonstrate that memories normally dependent on the hippocampus are incrementally strengthened in other memory networks with additional learning. The latter provides a new account for patterns of hippocampal retrograde amnesia and how memories may become independent of the hippocampus.Contextual fear conditioning can be supported by two neural systems, one that contains the hippocampus (HPC), and one that does not. Evidence for this assertion comes from studies in which the HPC, in rats, is damaged either before or after the contextual fear conditioning. Extensive damage to the HPC before conditioning has little effect on contextual fear conditioning (Maren et al. 1997; Frankland et al. 1998; Wiltgen et al. 2006). This result can only mean that there is a non-HPC memory system that can support fear of context. In contrast, there is unequivocal evidence that moderate to extensive damage to the HPC soon after learning severely impairs the ability of the conditioning context to evoke fear, suggesting that the HPC normally makes a major contribution to this type of memory (Kim and Fanselow 1992; Maren et al. 1997; Frankland et al. 1998; Anagnostaras et al. 1999; Debiec et al. 2002; Lehmann et al. 2007b; Sutherland et al. 2008; Wang et al. 2009).The dissociable effects of pre- and post-training HPC damage on contextual fear conditioning have been interpreted as suggesting that: (1) When the HPC is intact during learning it interferes with other systems and prevents them from acquiring an independent contextual fear conditioning memory, and (2) when the HPC is absent, these other systems are released from this interference and are able to rapidly acquire an independent memory (Maren et al. 1997; Frankland et al. 1998; Fanselow and Poulos 2004; Driscoll et al. 2005; Lehmann et al. 2006; Sutherland et al. 2006). The latter interference from the HPC on the other memory systems has been termed overshadowing. Supplemental Figure S1 depicts data from our laboratory demonstrating the overshadowing phenomenon and the dissociable effects of HPC damage induced before and after contextual fear conditioning.Very little, however, is known about the parameters determining the extent to which the HPC system interferes with the non-HPC system for control over contextual fear. The purpose of the current study is to provide some insight into this issue. Typically, contextual fear conditioning in rats is conducted in a single conditioning session in which a configuration of static background cues is paired with several footshocks. When returned to the conditioning context, rats display several species-specific defensive responses including freezing (i.e., absence of movement except for breathing). Several theorists have proposed that non-HPC systems are more likely to be recruited when there are multiple experiences with similar events, which, in turn, would mitigate the necessity of the HPC for memory expression (O''Keefe and Nadel 1978; Sherry and Schacter 1987; McClelland et al. 1995; O''Reilly and Rudy 2001; White and McDonald 2002). Accordingly, we hypothesized that repeated contextual fear conditioning sessions separated by hours and days would overcome the HPC interference or overshadowing effect. In other words, with repeated learning sessions, enough information would be incrementally captured by the non-HPC system to support a contextual fear memory that would survive complete damage to the HPC.Adult male rats received 11 fear-conditioning sessions across 6 d. In each session, they were placed in a context and received mild footshocks (Shock Context). Concurrently, the rats were exposed 10 times to another context in which they never received shock (No-Shock Context). The No-Shock Context served as a control condition to measure whether the rats simply showed generalized fear or could show context-specific memory. Within 72 h following the last conditioning session, rats either received sham surgery or complete lesions of the HPC using the neurotoxin N-methyl-d-aspartic acid (NMDA) (Lehmann et al. 2007a). Rats were then tested for retention in both the Shock and No-Shock Contexts in a counterbalanced order. In addition, in a single learning episode, another group of rats received a matching number of shocks (i.e., 12 shocks) and context exposure (i.e., 17 min), and then received surgery 7–10 d after conditioning. The latter interval is identical to the interval between the initial conditioning session and surgery in the repeated learning condition. Figure 1 illustrates and describes the design of the experiments.Open in a separate windowFigure 1.Illustration of the experimental design used in (A) the single conditioning session and (B) repeated conditioning session experiments. In A the rats were initially placed in the conditioning chamber for 17 min and received the first of 12 footshocks (1 mA/2 sec) at the 300-sec mark, and then one every following 58 sec after shock offset. Seven to 10 d later, the rats either received sham or HPC damage (Sx). Approximately 10 d after, the rats were returned to the chamber to assess freezing over a 5-min retention test. In B the rats were placed initially in the conditioning chamber for 1 min and received a shock at the 45-sec mark (Shock Context). Approximately 45 min later, the rats were placed in a different chamber for 1 min and did not receive shock (No-Shock Context). The procedure was repeated twice daily for five consecutive days, and the Shock and No-Shock chamber order was counterbalanced according to the principles of a Latin Square design. The rats then received sham or HPC damage 1–3 d later. The rats'' retention was assessed in both contexts ∼10 d after surgery in both the Shock and No-Shock Context in a counterbalanced order with a 24-h span between tests. Importantly, the number of shocks, context exposure time, and interval between initial learning and surgery were matched between both experiments.When all shocks were delivered in a single session, HPC damage caused profound retrograde amnesia. As illustrated in Figure 2A, the HPC rats displayed significantly less freezing than control rats during the retention test (t₍₈₎ = 23.895, P < 0.001). This result replicates all previous studies in which the HPC was damaged days after a single contextual fear conditioning training session (Kim and Fanselow 1992; Maren et al. 1997; Frankland et al. 1998; Anagnostaras et al. 1999; Debiec et al. 2002; Lehmann et al. 2007b; Sutherland et al. 2008).Open in a separate windowFigure 2.Mean (± SEM) percent time freezing by Sham and HPC rats during the retention test of the (A) single conditioning (12 shocks) experiment and (B) repeated conditioning session experiment. In A the HPC rats showed significantly less freezing (P < 0.001) than the Sham rats, suggesting that the damage caused profound retrograde amnesia for contextual fear conditioning learned in a single session 7–10 d before surgery. In B the performance of the HPC rats did not significantly differ from the Sham rats, and they exhibited significantly more freezing in the Shock Context than the No-Shock Context (P < 0.001). Consequently, repeated conditioning sessions prevented the retrograde amnesic effects normally observed in contextual fear conditioning following HPC damage, suggesting that other neural networks were now able to support the memory.In striking contrast, memory for contextual fear conditioning was spared when the HPC was damaged after repeated conditioning sessions. Figure 2B shows the percent time spent freezing during the retention test in the Shock and No-Shock Contexts. An ANOVA with between-group factor (Lesion: Sham and HPC) and within-group factor (Context: Shock and No-Shock) revealed a significant main effect of Context (F_(1,14) = 84.731, P < 0.001), indicating that the rats displayed higher levels of freezing in the Shock than in the No-Shock Context. The effect of Lesion (F_(1,14) = 4.280, P = 0.058) was not significant, nor was the Lesion × Context interaction (F_(1,14) = 0.877, P = 0.369), suggesting that extensive HPC damage did not impair memory. The tendency for an effect of Lesion is due to the HPC rats freezing less than the Sham rats in the No-Shock Context (P = 0.06) rather than freezing less in the Shock Context (P = 0.457).The repeated conditioning sessions clearly enabled a contextual fear representation to be established in non-HPC memory systems. However, it is surprising that the HPC damage did not impair the ability to discriminate between the Shock and No-Shock Context, because evidence suggests that context discrimination is dependent on the HPC (see Moscovitch et al. 2006). Indeed, studies of rats with HPC damage induced before learning have shown that contextual fear conditioning is acquired quickly by non-HPC systems in a single session, but the ability to discriminate between the training context and a new context is lost (Frankland et al. 1998; Antoniadis and McDonald 2000; Winocur et al. 2007). Hence, it is significant in the present study that the HPC damage did not impair context discrimination abilities in the rats that received repeated learning episodes. The latter appear to have established a context representation, outside of the HPC, that was not bereft of details. Yet, one should consider that the rats in the repeated sessions experiment received experience in both the Shock and No-Shock Contexts prior to surgery, and this discrimination training procedure may have established two different non-HPC representations. It remains possible that HPC damage would impair the ability to discriminate the Shock Context from a new context, which is what is found in anterograde amnesia studies (Frankland et al. 1998; Antoniadis and McDonald 2000; Winocur et al. 2007). To address this possibility, a new experiment examined whether HPC-damaged rats could discriminate the Shock Context from a Novel Context. Rats were trained with the same repeated learning protocol as described earlier, with the exception that the rats were never placed in the No-Shock Context prior to surgery. One to 3 d following learning, the rats either received Sham or complete HPC damage. They were then tested for retention in the Shock and the Novel (i.e., No-Shock) Context in a counterbalanced order. Figure 3 shows the percent time spent freezing during the retention test in the Shock and Novel Contexts. An ANOVA with between-group factor (Lesion: Sham and HPC) and within-group factor (Context: Shock and Novel) revealed that the rats froze significantly more in the Shock than the Novel Context (F_(1,10) = 57.393, P < 0.001). However, no significant difference was found between the HPC and Sham groups (F_(1,10) = 0.597, P = 0.458) and the Lesion × Context interaction did not reach significance (F_(1,10) = 0.123, P = 0.733). Thus, as in the previous repeated sessions experiment, the HPC damage did not cause retrograde amnesia for contextual fear conditioning and, more importantly, the HPC damage did not impair the ability to discriminate between the original context and new context.Open in a separate windowFigure 3.Mean (± SEM) percent time freezing by Sham and HPC rats in the Shock and Novel Contexts during the retention tests of the discrimination experiment. The rats exhibited significantly more freezing in the Shock than the Novel Context (P < 0.001), and the HPC rats did not significantly differ from the Sham rats, suggesting that the HPC-damaged rats remembered the specific meaning of the Shock Context as well as control rats. Hence, repeated conditioning sessions established a context-rich representation in non-HPC systems, which supports successful context discriminations.The absence of amnesia for contextual fear conditioning in the current study is not due to insufficient damage to the HPC. We calculated (see Lehmann et al. 2007b) that an average of 83% of the HPC was damaged across rats (smallest: 64%; largest: 90%) in the repeated learning experiments (see Supplemental material for more histological details). The amount of HPC damage is substantially more than that found in most studies reporting impairments for contextual fear conditioning following HPC damage (Kim and Fanselow 1992; Maren et al. 1997; Frankland et al. 1998; Anagnostaras et al. 1999; Debiec et al. 2002) and more than for the single-session experiment (average 76%) in which we currently report amnesia. Therefore, the amount of HPC damage inflicted in the rats in this study is certainly sufficient to disrupt HPC-dependent memories.Like others (Kim and Fanselow 1992; Maren et al. 1997; Frankland et al. 1998; Anagnostaras et al. 1999; Debiec et al. 2002; Lehmann et al. 2007b; Sutherland et al. 2008), we found that damage to the HPC after a single contextual fear-conditioning session involving multiple shocks produces profound retrograde amnesia for contextual fear conditioning. However, in two separate experiments, distributing shock across multiple conditioning sessions prevented this amnesia. In one case, the rats experienced Context–Shock pairings in one context and no shock in another context. Following this training, rats with damage to the HPC did not differ from control rats in the absolute amount of freezing in the training context nor in their ability to discriminate between the two contexts. In the second case, rats only received the multiple Context–Shock sessions. Rats with damage to the HPC could not be distinguished from control rats during the test in the training context or in their responses to a novel context. These findings provide new support for the general idea that contextual fear conditioning can be supported by both HPC and non-HPC systems. This conclusion is supported by (1) the finding that damage to the HPC following a single conditioning session virtually eliminates freezing during the test, implying the importance of the HPC system, and (2) that following multiple conditioning sessions, damage to the HPC has no effect on either contextual fear displayed in the training context or their ability to discriminate the training context from other contexts, suggesting the existence of non-HPC systems that can support contextual fear. The findings also reveal that the overshadowing or interference by the HPC over the non-HPC memory systems for control over contextual fear is not absolute. Following a single conditioning session, removal of the HPC produced a devastating retrograde amnesia, illustrating substantial overshadowing. However, distributing conditioning across several sessions completely attenuated the effects of damage to the HPC, revealing that non-HPC systems can support contextual fear conditioning despite the HPC, and revealed the importance of multiple sessions for this to occur.The overshadowing by the HPC is based on the familiar idea in associative learning at the behavioral level, where through a competitive process some of the cues that redundantly predict a reinforcer acquire the ability to generate strong conditioned responding, while other equally predictive, but less salient cues do not (Stout et al. 2003). Conditioning to the less potent cues proceeds more effectively if the more potent competitors are absent. Following the same principle, if the HPC representation is active, then learning in the non-HPC systems suffers strong interference. In contrast, in the absence of the HPC representation, learning in non-HPC systems is released from this interfering effect of the HPC. Thus, the learning rate in non-HPC networks is potently lowered by the activity of the HPC. However, with repeated learning, other structures, which are overshadowed by the HPC, may cumulatively build a representation that achieves HPC independence. The current findings clearly support this hypothesis, whereby repeated learning episodes incrementally established a contextual fear-conditioning representation outside of the HPC that mitigated the usual retrograde amnesic effects of HPC damage.One important question is where does the HPC interference occur? Biedenkapp and Rudy (2009) recently reported that the HPC competes with the basolateral region of the amygdala during fear conditioning. Previously, Guarraci et al. (1999) found that the amount of conditioned fear produced by training could be increased if the dopamine D1 receptor agonist {"type":"entrez-protein","attrs":{"text":"SKF82958","term_id":"1156217255","term_text":"SKF82958"}}SKF82958 was injected into the basolateral region. Biedenkapp and Rudy (2009) reasoned that if this is the area where the HPC interferes with non-HPC systems for the association with shock, then a local infusion of {"type":"entrez-protein","attrs":{"text":"SKF82958","term_id":"1156217255","term_text":"SKF82958"}}SKF82958 before a single session of contextual fear conditioning should attenuate the interference and allow the non-HPC system to gain more control over contextual fear. Their data supported this hypothesis, which leads to the possibility that with multiple conditioning sessions, the non-HPC system gradually gains association with these fear-supporting neurons in this region of the brain.Patients with bilateral damage to the HPC often exhibit temporally graded retrograde amnesia, such that recently acquired memories are lost, whereas remote memories, especially those acquired years before the damage, are more likely to be spared (Scoville and Milner 1957; Rempel-Clower et al. 1996). This pattern of amnesia is taken as evidence for temporally based systems consolidation, whereby over time the essential support for memories is “switched” from dependence on the HPC to neocortical networks (McClelland et al. 1995; Squire and Alvarez 1995; Anagnostaras et al. 2001; Meeter and Murre 2004; Squire et al. 2004; Wiltgen et al. 2004; Frankland and Bontempi 2005). Our research, however, points to another process for becoming independent of the HPC, a change in the strength of the representation in non-HPC systems during learning rather than a consolidation process linked to the passage of time since the learning episode. A study of a former London taxi driver with bilateral HPC damage alludes to this possibility (Maguire et al. 2006). This amnesic patient showed greater retrograde amnesia for roads that he used less commonly than the major arteries that he used regularly. Hence, greater exposure to the major arteries established memories in non-HPC systems, whereas roads with less exposure remained dependent on the HPC regardless of the age of the memory. Our findings add support to this view, because studies examining the effects of complete HPC damage after a single conditioning episode suggest that the HPC is permanently involved in contextual fear conditioning (Lehmann et al. 2007b; Sutherland et al. 2008); yet, with repeated learning episodes we clearly demonstrated that the memory rapidly becomes independent of the HPC. The latter is important because the process for memories becoming independent of the HPC need not require systems consolidation.In conclusion, this is the first example of intact contextual fear memories following complete HPC damage induced soon after learning. Importantly, repetition of the learning episode underlies the change in memory from HPC dependent to HPC independent. We argue that each learning episode incrementally establishes a representation in non-HPC memory systems—a representation that ultimately becomes sufficiently strong to support memory expression without the HPC. The current findings also demonstrate the critical need to consider learning parameters when discussing patterns of retrograde amnesia and the role of the HPC in memory.     

Repression and the inaccessibility of affective memories

The fundamental assumption that repression involves an inaccessibility to affective memories has not been directly addressed in empirical research. In the present study we examined three groups of subjects (repressors, low anxious, and high anxious) under six conditions of recall (general, happy, sad, anger, fear, and wonder). Subjects were asked to recall personal experiences from childhood and to rate their current mood and the affective intensity of the memories. The results indicated that repressors recalled significantly fewer negative memories than did low-anxious and high-anxious subjects and, furthermore, that they were substantially older at the time of the earliest negative memory recalled. Compared with low-anxious subjects, repressors also recalled fewer positive affective memories as well. This pattern of findings is consistent with the hypothesis that repression involves an inaccessibility to negative emotional memories and indicates further that repression is associated in some way with the suppression or inhibition of emotional experiences in general. The concept of repression as a process involving limited access to negative affective memories appears to be valid.