According to an article from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, memories you want to forget are the hardest ones to lose. This may explain why some memories can "haunt" you all your life.

In the early 1990s, the rage was "repressed memories" of abuse. It was theorized that extremely traumatic memories of sexual and other types of abuse were easily masked from consciousness by the emotional trauma. Basically, the theory was that if it hurt enough, you'd easily forget the memory. After a few high-profile cases resulted in wrongful prosecution, researchers began investigating possible false memories (Loftus, et al) – in which "repressed" memories often turned out to be implanted memories – outright fabrications.

Now research has proven out Loftus' claim that many traumatic memories are the result of therapy rather than actual events. The study quoted in this article demonstrates that rather than easily repressed, traumatic memories – especially highly emotional memories containing a visual element – can be VERY difficult to forget – and let go of.

According to the study's lead author, Keith Payne, an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, painful, emotional memories that people would most like to forget may be the toughest to leave behind, especially when memories are created through visual cues.

"When you're watching the news on television and see footage of wounded soldiers in Iraq or ongoing coverage of national tragedies, it may stick with you more than a newspaper headline," said Payne.

Their study, "Emotional constraints on intentional forgetting," appears in the September 2007 print issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

When people are trying to intentionally forget information, they need to mentally segregate that information and then block off the information they don't want to retrieve, Payne said. Emotion undermines both of those steps. "You make a lot of connections between emotional events and other parts of your life, so it might be difficult to isolate them. As far as blocking retrieval of an unwanted event, emotion makes events very salient and therefore highly accessible," Payne said.

The researchers found that their subjects could not intentionally forget emotional events as easily as mundane ones. They also found that both pleasant and unpleasant emotional memories were resistant to intentional forgetting."Our findings add to accumulating evidence that emotion places limits on the ability to control the contents of the mind," Payne said. "Our results suggest that even a relatively mild emotional reaction can undermine intentional forgetting. But this doesn't necessarily mean that emotional memories can never be intentionally forgotten. If the motivation to forget is powerful enough, individuals might be able to overcome the effects of emotion by enlisting additional coping strategies." And that's where Rapid Eye Technology comes in.

Rather than forgetting traumatic memories, Rapid Eye Technology allows you to segregate the information inherent in the experience from the emotional elements in them. When the emotions are released, the information comes forth clearly. This makes intentional forgetting much easier to do – and much less necessary. It may also make memories much easier to control.

The study can be found online at http://www.sciencedirect.com.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Chapel Hill, NC 27514
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http://www.unc.edu