Eric Eich

Memory for pain: Relation between past and present pain intensity

&NA; Memory for the intensity of past physical pain depends critically on the intensity of present pain, When their present pain intensity was high, patients with chronic headaches of myofascial origin rated their maximum, usual, and minimum levels of prior pain as being more severe than their hourly pain diaries indicated. When their present pain intensity was low, the same patients remembered all 3 levels of prior pain as being less severe than they actually had been. The results show that pain produces systematic distortions of memory similar to those associated with alterations of affect or mood, and suggest a resolution to a conspicuous conflict in the current pain literature.

Memory for unattended events: Remembering with and without awareness

The effects of memory for unattended events—for example, events that occur while a person is asleep, anesthetized, or selectively attending to other ongoing events, as in a speech-shadowing task—are rarely revealed in tests of retention that require remembering to be deliberate or intentional. Might such effects become evident in tests that do not demand awareness of remembering? Results of the present shadowing study, involving the recognition and spelling of previously unattended homophones, suggest an affirmative answer to this question.

Searching for Mood Dependent Memory

Though it has sometimes been shown that events encoded in a certain state of affect or mood are most retrievable in that state, neither the circumstances under which mood dependent memory (MDM) occurs nor the mechanisms that enable its emergence are as yet well understood The purpose of the research reviewed here is to clarify these circumstances and mechanisms To this end, the research focuses on four factors that appear to play pivotal roles in the occurrence of MDM These factors are (a) the nature of the target events or the manner in which they are encoded (i e, are events generated through internal mental processes such as reasoning, imagination, or thought more apt to be forgotten following a shift in mood state than are events that emanate mainly from external sources?), (b) the nature of the retrieval task (is it possible to demonstrate mood dependence using implicit rather than explicit measures of memory?), (c) efficacy of mood modification (do strong, stable, and authentic affective states promote the appearance of MDM?), and (d) whether alterations in affect are one-dimensional or two-dimensional (does a shift along both the pleasure and the arousal dimensions of mood impair memory more than does a shift along the pleasure dimension alone?) Exploring these four factors in detail may make it possible to resolve much of the controversy that now surrounds MDM, and to acquire fresh insights into its cognitive and affective foundations

Vantage point in episodic memory

University undergraduates undertook a series of manual tasks (e.g., shaping objects out of clay) and later recalled the experiences they had while doing so from either afield or anobserver vantage point. In the former case, the subjects mentally reinstated the original task environment as if they were seeing it again through their own eyes; in the latter condition, the original task environment was envisioned from the perspective of a detached spectator. Analysis of the subjects’ recollections revealed marked differences in the contents of field and observer memories. For instance, whereas field memories afforded richer accounts of the affective reactions, physical sensations, and psychological states that the subjects experienced as they performed the tasks, observer memories included more information about how the subjects looked, what they did, or where things were. Discussion focuses on prospects for future research whose aim would be to investigate the forensic and clinical implications of the field/observer distinction.

Business Not as Usual

In January 2014, Psychological Science introduces several significant changes in the journal’s publication standards and practices, aimed at enhancing the reporting of research findings and methodology. These changes are incorporated in five initiatives on word limits, evaluation criteria, methodological reports, open practices, and “new” statistics. The scope of these five initiatives is sketched here, along with the reasoning behind them.

Mood as a mediator of place dependent memory.

Converging evidence form 3 studies suggests that how well information transfers from one environment to another depends on how similar the environments feel rather than on how similar they look. Thus, even when target events are encoded and retrieved in the same physical setting, memory performance suffers if the attending affective states differ. Conversely, a change in environment produces no performance decrement if, whether by chance (Experiments 1 and 2) or by design (Experiment 3), the mood at encoding matches the mood at retrieval. These observations imply that place dependent effects are mediated by alterations in affect or mood, and that data that appear on the surface to demonstrate place dependent memory may, at a deeper level, denote the presence of mood dependent memory. Discussion focuses on prospects for future research aimed at clarifying the relations among moods, places, and memory.

Are Real Moods Required to Reveal Mood-Congruent and Mood-Dependent Memory?

While simulating, or acting as if, they were either happy or sad, university students recounted emotionally positive, neutral, or negative events from their personal past. Two days later, subjects were asked to freely recall the gist of all of these events, and they did so while simulating a mood that either did or did not match the one they had feigned before. By comparing the present results with those of a previous study, in which affectively realistic and subjectively convincing states of happiness and sadness had been engendered experimentally, we searched for—and found—striking differences between simulated and actual moods in their impact on autobiographical memory. In particular, it appears that the mood-congruent effects elicited by simulated moods are qualitatively different from those evoked by induced moods, and that only authentic affects have the power to produce mood-dependent effects.

Affect, pain, and autobiographical memory.

Twenty-five young female undergraduates were tested on two occasions: once when they were experiencing menstrual pain of at least moderate severity and once when they were pain free. On each occasion, Ss rated their current levels of pain and affect and retrieved real-life events from their personal past. At the end of the second occasion, Ss were reminded of all of the events they had retrieved on either occasion, and then rated the pleasantness of these events at the time of their original occurrence. Results revealed that the impact of pain on autobiographical memory was wholly mediated by its influence on mood. That is, pain impeded access to memories of pleasant personal experiences, whereas it promoted the retrieval of unpleasant events only if pain was accompanied by an increase in unpleasant affect. Discussion centers on the clinical and cognitive implications of the present results, and on prospects for future research.

Neural systems mediating field and observer memories

Autobiographical memories are more imbued with affect when one adopts a first-person or field perspective during event retrieval, rather than a third-person or observer perspective. We combined fMRI, event narratives, and subjective ratings to identify the neural networks engaged with field versus observer memories for real-world events. Our results revealed significant decreases in bilateral insula and left somato-motor activity during the recall of observer memories, paired with a small relative increase in right posterior amygdala activity coincident with the recall of field memories. Notably, these regions showed no overlap with those areas mediating the narrative content and subjective emotionality of the remembered events. Our findings suggest that the emotionality of field relative to observer memories is not simply driven by increased limbic activation when one adopts a first-person retrieval perspective. Rather, there is also a significant reduction in ones cortical representations of the physical, embodied self when a third-person--or disembodied--perspective is taken at retrieval.

Anesthesia, Amnesia, and the Memory/awareness Distinction

Several studies have shown that surgical patients cannot consciously recall or recognize events to which they had been exposed during general anesthesia. Might evidence of memory for intraoperative events be revealed through the performance of a postoperative test that does not require remembering to be deliberate or intentional? Results of the present study, involving the recognition and spelling of semantically biased homophones, suggest a negative answer to this question and imply that intraoperative events cannot be remembered postoperatively, either with or without awareness.