Emotional constraints on intentional forgetting

One way people control the contents of their minds is intentional forgetting—voluntarily forgetting events after they have happened. The events people would most like to forget are unpleasant and emotional. This study used a directed forgetting procedure with emotional and neutral pictures to examine whether people can intentionally forget emotional events as easily as mundane ones. When the to-be-forgotten list was neutral, participants showed successful intentional forgetting. But when the to-be-forgotten list was emotional, directed forgetting failed. Results contribute to understanding the ways that emotion constrains mental control by capturing mental processes including memory retrieval. Emotion may short-circuit attempts to forget those parts of the past people would most like to forget.     

Knowing what to remember and forget: A developmental study of cue memory in intentional forgetting

These experiments are the first to investigate children’s encoding and use of information about a memory cue in Bjork’s (1972) intentional forgetting task. In Experiment 1, children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 and college students were given cues to either remember or forget after the presentation of each picture. Recall and recognition tests of pictures and cues followed. The procedure in Experiment 2 was identical to that in Experiment 1 except that the list of presentation pictures was altered for some children (Grades 3 and 4) and adolescents (Grades 8 and 9) so that remember and forget cues were associated with particular taxonomic categories. In Experiment 3, the testing component was modified so that children (Grades 2, 3, and 4) and college students were asked to recall only the cue associated with each picture. The results indicated that (1) children as young as second graders encode the cue associated with each picture, although to a lesser extent than do college students, (2) much improvement in intentional forgetting is still occurring during adolescence, (3) only adults adequately cluster their recall by cue, (4) associating remember and forget cues with items from different categories does not increase the differentiation between cues, and (5) eliminating picture recall and recognition has minimal effects on the magnitude of cue judgments. These results suggest that children’s difficulties on intentional forgetting tasks stem, at least in part, from their poorer encoding of information about whether an item should be remembered or forgotten.     

Overcoming the effects of intentional forgetting

The long-term effects of the compartmentalization of task-irrelevant memories were investigated using a directed forgetting procedure. Many models tacitly assume the persistence of the costs and benefits of directed forgetting or otherwise fail to predict what factors might reduce or eliminate them. In contrast, a retrieving effectively from memory model (REM; Lehman & Malmberg, 2009) predicts that intentional forgetting should only be observed for free recall when temporal context is used to probe memory. By manipulating whether study lists were constructed from category exemplars or from a random set of words, and by either providing temporal or category cues at test, we tested the prediction. The effects of directed forgetting were eliminated when categorized lists were studied and category cues were provided. When categorized lists were used but category cues were not provided, the usual costs and benefits of directed forgetting were observed. These results specify the conditions under which the consequences of intentional forgetting can be overcome.     

Influences of intentional and unintentional forgetting on false memories

In 2 experiments, we examined the interplay of 2 types of memory errors: forgetting and false memory--errors of omission and commission, respectively. We examined the effects of 2 manipulations known to inhibit retrieval of studied words--directed forgetting and part-list cuing--on the false recall of an unstudied "critical" word following study of its 15 strongest associates. Participants cued to forget the 1st of 2 studied lists before studying the 2nd recalled fewer List 1 words but intruded the missing critical word more often than did participants cued to remember both lists. By contrast, providing some studied words as cues during recall reduced both recall of the remaining studied words and intrusions of the critical word. The results suggest that forgetting can increase or decrease false memories, depending on whether such forgetting reflects impaired access to an entire episode or retrieval competition among elements of an episode.     

Rumination and intentional forgetting of emotional material

The tendency to respond to negative life events and negative mood states with ruminative thinking has been linked to emotion dysregulation and to a heightened risk for the onset and maintenance of emotional disorders. To further investigate this maladaptive response style, the present study examined whether rumination is linked to individual differences in the ability to intentionally forget emotional material. In a directed forgetting task, participants were instructed to memorise a list of positive and negative words and were subsequently told to forget these words. Next, participants were told to memorise a new list and, finally, recall was tested for all to-be-forgotten and to-be-remembered words. Our results demonstrate a close relation between rumination and recall in the forget condition but not in the remember condition. Specifically, compared to participants who scored low on the Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS), participants who scored high exhibited reduced forgetting of positive and negative to-be-forgotten words. These results remained stable when depression scores were included as a covariate suggesting that irrespective of depressive symptoms, rumination and intentional forgetting of emotional material are closely related.     

The role of intentional forgetting in employee selection

The authors examined the effects of forbidden information on the employee-selection process. They presented the participants with 4 applicants for the position of cashier-stockperson. One of the applicants (the Target Applicant) provided a mixture of forbidden and job-relevant information; the remaining applicants gave no forbidden information. Some of the participants were told before they reviewed the applicants what types of information were to be considered as forbidden, and they were instructed to disregard any such information in the applications. The remaining participants were not aware of the presence of the forbidden information, nor were they instructed to disregard such information. The participants who were instructed to disregard the forbidden information rated the Target Applicant more favorably than did those who were not aware of its presence. Moreover, those in the disregard condition recalled less of the forbidden information and more of the job-relevant information about the Target Applicant than did those in the no-instruction condition. These data patterns support laboratory-based studies on intentional forgetting.     

Remembering the good, forgetting the bad: intentional forgetting of emotional material in depression

The authors examined intentional forgetting of negative material in depression. Participants were instructed to not think about emotional nouns that they had learned to associate with a neutral cue word. The authors provided participants with multiple occasions to suppress the unwanted words. Overall, depressed participants successfully forgot negative words. Moreover, the authors obtained a clear practice effect. However, forgetting came at a cost: Compared with the nondepressed participants and with the depressed participants who were instructed to forget positive words, depressed participants who were instructed to forget negative words showed significantly worse recall of the baseline words. These results indicate that training depressed individuals in intentional forgetting could prove to be an effective strategy to counteract automatic ruminative tendencies and mood-congruent biases.     

Personality correlates of retrieval processes in intentional and unintentional forgetting

Early accounts of intentional forgetting relied exclusively on mechanisms that operate at encoding. The results of more recent experiments indicate that memory-retrieval inhibition also is involved, thus linking waking intentional forgetting with hypnotic amnesia. The present Experiment 1 was designed to provide further support for the retrieval-inhibition hypothesis by testing four alternative explanations for some of the recent results. Experiment 2 examined the role of word affect in both intentional forgetting and unintentional forgetting to evaluate theoretical interpretations of the retrieval mechanisms thought to be involved. Unintentional forgetting of negative words was consistent with a repression-like interpretation, whereas intentional forgetting of negative words appeared to be limited by sensitization. Personality correlates of the recall results were identified and were found to be in support of these interpretations.     

The role of intentional forgetting in reducing children's retroactive interference.

Preschool and kindergarten children's retention of stories was examined in the presence of interfering information and instructions to forget. Children learned 2 stories and, 24 hr later, were asked to recall the 1st or 2nd story learned. Some of the children were instructed, either following acquisition or just prior to the retention test, to forget the 2nd, or interfering, story. A model was used to isolate storage and retrieval effects, and the results showed that (a) retroactive interference affected both storage- and retrieval-based forgetting rates for the younger children but only storage-based forgetting rates for the older children, (b) intentional forgetting reduced retroactive interference primarily by attenuating storage-based forgetting regardless of age, (c) intentional forgetting instructions were effective only at acquisition for preschoolers but at both acquisition and retention for kindergarteners, and (d) all children recalled the to-be-forgotten story as well as they recalled the to-be-remembered story. These results are interpreted in terms of reorganization and distinctiveness effects in storage.     

Predicting post‐traumatic growth and post‐traumatic stress in firefighters

Emergency service workers (e.g., firefighters, police, and paramedics) are exposed to elevated levels of potentially traumatising events through the course of their work. Such exposure can have lasting negative consequences (e.g., post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)) and/or positive outcomes (e.g., post‐traumatic growth (PTG)). Research had implicated trauma, occupational and personal variables that account for variance in post‐trauma outcomes yet at this stage no research has investigated these factors and their relative influence on both PTSD and PTG in a single study. Based in Calhoun and Tedeschi's model of PTG and previous research, in this study regression models of PTG and PTSD symptoms among 218 firefighters were tested. Results indicated organisational factors predicted symptoms of PTSD, while there was partial support for the hypothesis that coping and social support would be predictors of PTG. Experiencing multiple sources of trauma, higher levels of organisational and operational stress, and utilising cognitive reappraisal coping were all significant predictors of PTSD symptoms. Increases in PTG were predicted by experiencing trauma from multiple sources and the use of self‐care coping. Results highlight the importance of organisational factors in the development of PTSD symptoms, and of individual factors for promoting PTG.     

Withdrawal of spatial overt attention following intentional forgetting: evidence from eye movements

Eye movements were measured to examine whether item-method directed forgetting involved a spatial overt attention shift. Experiment 1 showed that participants’ eyes were moved away from the study word following the forget and ignore cues, but not the remember cue. Experiment 2 revealed that the eyes were moved away from the area that covered by the study word even when the study word disappeared upon the presentation of the memory cue. Both the study word and memory cue were presented auditorily in Experiment 3. In all experiments, the to-be-remembered words were recalled better than both to-be-forgotten and to-be-ignored words. More importantly, mental effort, as indexed by the pupil size, increased following the remember, as compared with the forget and ignore cues. These findings are discussed in terms of controlling spatial overt attention after encoding to withdraw attention from irrelevant information and to allocate cognitive resources to relevant information for long-term retention.     

Retrieval‐induced forgetting in normal ageing

The retrieval‐induced forgetting (RIF) paradigm was used to assess the integrity of unintentional inhibitory functioning in normal ageing. The paradigm was adapted to explore the RIF effect under conditions that allow us to differentiate the contribution of intentional and automatic retrieval processes to performance. The results showed the presence of equivalent and significant RIF effects in young and older adults, for both the intentional and automatic retrieval performance. These results suggest that unintentional inhibitory processes are spared in normal ageing and confirm that RIF effect is independent of the kind of memory processes involved in task performance.     

Counselling and psychotherapy post‐COVID‐19

We consider how the prolonged, complex and uncertain aftermath of the COVID‐19 crisis will present challenges and opportunities for counselling and psychotherapy. Increased mental strain on populations, individuals and professionals is likely to be compounded by further constraints in therapeutic resources. Nevertheless, emerging needs and priorities will offer ground for systems thinking in linking the application of a range of therapeutic frameworks, theories to address global challenges, integration of counselling and psychotherapy into new sectors, service models for the most vulnerable, use of digital approaches, support mechanisms for professionals and interdisciplinary research.     

Effects of testing on subsequent re‐encoding and long‐term forgetting of action‐relevant materials: On the influence of recall type

Testing one's memory of previously studied information reduces the rate of forgetting, compared to restudy. However, little is known about how this direct testing effect applies to action phrases (e.g., “wash the car”) – a learning material relevant to everyday memory. As action phrases consist of two different components, a verb (e.g., “wash”) and a noun (e.g., “car”), testing can either be implemented as noun‐cued recall of verbs or verb‐cued recall of nouns, which may differently affect later memory performance. In the present study, we investigated the effect of testing for these two recall types, using verbally encoded action phrases as learning materials. Results showed that repeated study–test practice, compared to repeated study–restudy practice, decreased the forgetting rate across 1 week to a similar degree for both noun‐cued and verb‐cued recall types. However, noun‐cued recall of verbs initiated more new subsequent learning during the first restudy, compared to verb‐cued recall of nouns. The study provides evidence that testing has benefits on both subsequent restudy and long‐term retention of action‐relevant materials, but that these benefits are differently expressed with testing via noun‐cued versus verb‐cued recall.     

Retrieval‐induced forgetting: A developmental study

Two studies examined the possibility of retrieval‐induced forgetting by 7‐year‐olds. Children heard a story while viewing pictures of events mentioned in the story, each highlighting objects drawn from two distinct semantic categories (e.g. animals and food). Over the next several days, children were asked the same yes/no questions about half the examples from one category and, finally, were tested for their memory of the complete set of examples from both categories. Both a category‐cued recall test (Study 1) and a written recognition‐memory test (Study 2) produced results suggestive of retrieval‐induced forgetting. That is, children showed poorer memory for unpractised items from the practised category than for unpractised items from the other category. The severity of the effect did not differ reliably between the children and young adults, and was unaffected by whether practised items appeared before or after the unpractised competitors (Study 2). We consider the implications of these findings for competing views about retrieval‐induced forgetting and the development of cognitive inhibition.     

Effects of attentional demand,cue typicality,and priming on an event‐based prospective memory task

The main purpose of this experiment was to examine the independent and interactive effects of three variables—attentional demand, cue typicality, and priming—on an event‐based prospective memory task. High attentional demand was expected to lower performance, but cue typicality and priming were expected to improve performance. The prospective memory task entailed writing an ‘X’ after hearing items from four semantic categories (e.g. birds), while performing a free‐association task. Results showed the predicted effects of attentional demand and typicality. Priming did not affect overall prospective memory performance but, as predicted, improved performance under conditions of high attentional demand with a typical cue. Overall, these results show the importance of cue and capacity variables, but they also support the value of examining how different variables in the prospective memory task can interact in affecting performance. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.