生物谷报道：记忆的确是神奇的东西，人们要么忘却了不该忘的事情，要么是想抛开的回忆却无论如何也摆脱不掉。9月的《实验社会心理学杂志》(Journal of Experimental Social Psychology)即将发表的一项最新研究，为“越想忘的越忘不掉”找到了科学的解释。
领导该项研究的是美国北卡罗莱纳大学的心理学家Keith Payne。他和同事发现，情绪记忆是最难刻意忘掉的，尤其当这种记忆源于视觉线索。
Payne表示，主动忘却是一种适应性表现，比如，人们常常要忘掉错误的认识、朋友的旧电话号码或者更改前的会议时间。主动忘却有助于大脑的记忆存储系统更新新的信息。不过，Payne和同事在实验中发现，即使是轻微而温和的情感记忆事件，比如在考试分数不理想或者在工作中受到批评，都是很难被忘记的。
研究人员共调查了218位参与者在看过一些照片后的反应，而不是通常使用的文字内容，因为图像往往要比文字更容易让人印象深刻。他们注意到，那些调动了参与者情绪因素的照片内容比起平凡的内容，不容易被刻意忘却。此外，令人愉快和令人不悦的情绪记忆同样具有这种抵抗力。
Payne认为，人们要刻意忘却一件事情的前提条件就是要从精神上和与事件相关的信息完全隔离开来。然而，记忆中的情感因素往往会破坏这一过程。他说，“人们的情绪记忆在形成时，与自身生活的许多部分都发生了关联，因此要隔离它们很难。一旦人们要刻意忘却这些记忆，情感因素就会使它突显出来，因而更加难忘。”
不过，Payne强调，这一结果并不意味着情绪记忆永远不会被主动忘却。只要遗忘的动机足够强烈，人们完全可以超越情感因素的影响。(科学网 任霄鹏/编译)
原始出处:
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 43, Issue 5, September 2007, Pages 780-786
Emotional constraints on intentional forgetting
B. Keith Payne, a, and Elizabeth Corrigana
aDepartment of Psychology, Campus Box 3270, Davie Hall, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA
Received 20 October 2005; revised 13 July 2006. Available online 12 September 2006.
Abstract
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.
Keywords: Forgetting; Emotion; Memory
