Traumatic Memory

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Traumatic Memory
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What are your 3 most vivid memories?
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Most People DO NOT pick national events

• They Pick Highly personal events w/ emotional
  significance

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Traumatic Events

• Characteristics
• Very persistent
• Often highly accurate
• Usually integrity of central core of the
  experience is well remembered
• Sometimes subject to decay or distortion (likely
  specific details)
• PTSD

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Melindas Fire

• PTSD
• 5.2 million Americans (3.6)
• 30 Vietnam vets, 8 Gulf war vets
• 2x more women after exposure to trauma

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PTSD

• After exposure to terrifying event/ordeal where
  grave harm occurs/threatened
• Personal assaults
• Natural or man-made disasters
• Accidents
• Military combat
• Many repeatedly re-experience ordeal
• Flashback
• Nightmares
• Frightening thoughts
• Associated stimuli can trigger symptoms

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Symptoms

• Emotional numbness, memory problems, sleep
  disturbances, depression anxiety, irritability,
  guilt
• Attempts to avoid reminders/thoughts of ordeal
• Symptoms last gt 1month
• Other physical symptoms
• Headaches, GI, immune, dizziness, chest pain
• Frequently
• Substance abuse

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Biological Underpinnings

• Anxiety-fear circuit
• PTSD - elevated stress hormones
• High levels of opiates (numbness)
• AC - burns in abnormally strong memory?
• PET - AC vis ctx lights up when thinking of
  trauma (recall characterized by intense
  absorbing visual imagery)
• Hippocampal abnormalities?
• People w/ brain injury impaired memory
  reduced prevalence of PTSD

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Treatment
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Therapy

• Repeatedly re-lives experience under controlled
  conditions (work through trauma)
• Antidepressants- relieve many symptoms

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Prevention of PTSD

• Opportunity to talk soon after experience
• ß adrenergic blocker
• Results from pilot promising
• Blockade of NE in AC

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Repressed Memories?

• Amnesia for traumatic events
• Very murky!
• Intoxication, brain injury, loss of consciousness
• Often have prior brain trauma
• Hippocampus deficits?
• Conscious suppression (dont think or talk about)
• Bottomlineno scientific evid that there is a
  repression mechanism

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Williams Study

• Interviewed 129 women 20 yrs after admitted to ER
  after abuse
• Age- 10 mo-12 yrs
• 38- no memory of the hospital visit
• 12 - reported no hx of abuse
• May have forgotten
• Due to age
• There were many episodes, this one not singled
  out (many remembered abuse just not this ER
  visit)

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False Memories

• Erroneous memory
• 1990s many reports of recovery of sexual abuse
• Many were acquired in overenthusiastic therapy
• Nadean Cool
• Can induce false memories in the lab

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False Memories often created by combining actual
memories w/ suggestions received from others

• Exposure to misinformation induces memory
  distortion
• more easily modified with passage of time which
  allows memory to fade

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Elizabeth Loftus Study

• 4 events - 3 happened in childhood, 1 didnt
• Lost in the mall (didnt happen) - 4 elements
• Lost for extended time
• Crying
• Aid by elderly woman
• Reunion w/ family
• Examined recall in 3 different interviews - 25
  memory of fictitious event

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Ira Hyman Studies

• Read Ss events
• 100 Ss didnt remember that one in the first
  interview.
• 2nd interview
• 18-20 remembered false event