›› 2019, Vol. 42 ›› Issue (6): 1507-1513.

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Suppression-Induced Forgetting: The Effects of Suppression Parameters, Valence and Arousal of Experimental Materials, Anticipatory Effect and Individual Differences

Hong-Chao WANG1,ZHANG Qi2   

  1. 1. Liaoning Normal University
    2.
  • Received:2018-10-26 Revised:2019-04-26 Online:2019-11-20 Published:2019-11-20
  • Contact: ZHANG Qi

压抑遗忘的影响因素

王宏超1,张奇2   

  1. 1. 辽宁师范大学心理学院
    2. 辽宁师范大学
  • 通讯作者: 张奇

Abstract: Not all memories make people comfortable. People can forget unwelcome memories by retrieval suppression, that called suppression-induced forgetting. The Think/No-think paradigm employed to investigate suppression-induced forgetting includes Think, No-think, and Baseline conditions, respectively. If the recall accuracy of No-think cue-target word pairs is reduced significantly compared to Baseline cue-target word pairs, means suppression-induced forgetting is induced. As for the mechanism of suppression-induced forgetting, interference theory indicates that, suppression-induced forgetting is due to new association created with cue items interferes with the retrieval of old association. In contrast, inhibition theory claims that, suppression-induced forgetting is the result of impaired retention and accessibility of target memory by participants inhibit unwanted memories from entering consciousness. Based on inhibition, executive deficit hypothesis believes that, the differences of suppression-induced forgetting among individuals deserve from variant executive control ability. At present, the stability of suppression-induced forgetting is still controversial. For the purpose, the current paper summarizes prior papers and finds that, suppression-induced forgetting effect is mainly affected by the suppression parameters, valence and arousal level of experimental materials, anticipatory effect and individual differences and so on. Firstly, the suppression parameters consists of suppression duration and suppression times. Specifically, in terms of suppression duration, when the duration of Think/No-think phase is proper, if duration of a NT trial is set within 5s, suppression-induced forgetting may be detected, and it maybe increasingly enhance follow suppression duration increases. As far as suppression times is concerned, the number of suppression may need to set as at least 8 or more, only in that case, suppression-induced forgetting will tend to be stable. Secondly, the suppression-induced forgetting effect of negative emotional memories is stronger than neutral emotional memories. The possible reason is due to negative emotional memories are more susceptible to stronger inhibitory control compared to neutral memories. For the positive emotional memories, it can also induce suppression-induced forgetting. However, it is harder to forget those memories associated with positive emotion. Interestingly, positive emotional memories with high arousal are easily suppressed, while negative emotional memories are suppressed difficultly regardless of arousal. In addition, suppression-induced forgetting effect can be increased by means of participants make the preparation for retrieval suppression of target memory when anticipatory cue appears. Finally, suppression-induced forgetting is increasingly improved from children (8 years old) to adults, even not reduced markedly in old age. However, for the impaired memory suppression ability, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder patients forget negative emotional memories hard. Notably, stronger the executive control ability is, stronger the suppression-induced forgetting is. Therefore, executive control ability deficit maybe the reason why suppression-induced forgetting effect disappear for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder patients, too. In future, researches should investigate the effect of connective strength within memory control network on suppression-induced forgetting, especially for post-traumatic stress disorder and depression patients. Beyond that, researches should further examine the effects of emotional arousal and all kinds of negative emotions on suppression-induced forgetting, to explore whether insomnia and sleep deprivation can improve suppression-induced forgetting effect, and illustrate the relationship between inhibitory control and REM sleep duration and so on.

Key words: Suppression-induced forgetting, experimental factors, individual differences, memory control network

摘要: 人在生活中的一些负性经历或无效信息可以通过压抑提取而遗忘,这种遗忘称为压抑遗忘。压抑遗忘不仅受压抑时长、压抑次数、实验材料的情绪效价和唤醒度、期待效应等的影响,还受个体的年龄和精神障碍等的影响。今后应着重考察精神疾病个体记忆控制网络内的连接强度与压抑遗忘的关系,澄清压抑遗忘是否存在补偿机制。

关键词: 压抑遗忘, 实验因素, 个体差异, 记忆控制网络