Choosing your memories

Turns out memories aren't as solid as we might believe...the following are 38 ideas that might be of interest...found on this site http://www.getheroik.com/featured/38-memory-biases-that-change-the-story/


Not all memories are treated equally. A memory bias is a cognitive bias that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. There are many different types of memory biases, some that tend to serve you in positive ways and others that tend to get you in trouble. All of them effect your story and the way you remember it and retell it.

Positive Memory Biases

1. Remembering the past as having been better than it really was, is an example of rosy retrospection bias.
2. Remember the path taken or choices made as being better than those you did not, this is called the Choice-supportive bias.
3. Mistaking a memory for something you imagined is a memory bias of cryptomnesia or a false memory. Fiction can be fun and we can all live in our heads a bit too much. This can equally work against us.
4. Recalling the past in a self-serving manner, like the fish you caught as bigger than it was, the grades you received were higher than they were, or how high or far you jumped on the track team in college as better than they really were; these are all examples of egocentric bias.
5. Feelings associated with negative memories fade away more quickly than the feelings associated with positive experiences. This is referred to as a fading affect bias. This is the “let’s do that again” reaction that may recall the fun aspects of an event like
the glory of a long race, the excitement of a wild night, while forgetting the negative parts.
6. Things you find humorous are more easily remembered than the boring and mundane. This is an example of the memory bias called the Humor effect. This is why you can vividly remember a good laugh over a boring but important lecture. How you feel and enjoy a moment affects how you remember it.
7. Over time, as the details of an experience slip your mind, the events change in the retelling of the recollection, certain details may be crystal clear while others are exaggerated and together this exaggerates the relational details of the experience. This is said to be due to a bias of Leveling and Sharpening. This isn’t all bad news, after all, like a fine wine, some stories get better with age. The flavor certainly changes with the frequency and time that you share it as well.
8. Older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories is an example of the Positivity effect. This may influence you to be more susceptible to scams when you receive email about unclaimed inheritance from the prince of Nigeria, but it can also
help you maintain a rosy colored outlook that will support a vibrant and highly productive life.
9. If you’re in a good mood, you’ll remember other events and experiences where you had a similar mood. This is an example of mood congruent memory bias. Which memories do you want to tap into to fuel your day? Which do you believe will motivate and drive you to more productivity and higher performance?

Typical Troublemaker Biases

10. Remembering your past attitudes and behavior as resembling your current attitudes and behavior is called a consistency bias.
11. After putting in an effort to change or advance, remembering your past performance as more difficult than it actually was is called a change bias.
12. Remembering something as true because you’ve heard it somewhere else before from someone else before is an example of the Illusion-of-truth effect. You may perceive it as truth without validating the information. A great example of this are the many urban legends and celebrity myths that persist throughout society today. When you inaccurately remember the relationship between two moments, this is due to a bias called Illusory correlation.

Biases That We Take To Work & Beyond

13. It’s easier to remember where you put your car keys if your in the right area. It’s easier for witnesses to recall events if they stay at the scene. If you are removed from the context of an event, it’s harder to remember accurately. This is an example of the Context effect. You are better at remembering work related information while at work and home related events when at home.
14. You are better at remembering statements and/or information that you have made or created over those that other people make/create due to the Self-generation effect.
15. The tendency to forget information you can easily find online (and that’s everything these days) is said to be the result of the Google effect.
16. The Homer Simpson forehead slapping, “Doh” moments where you reflect on your memory and past events seem so predictable, avoidable, are examples of the Hindsight bias. This bias is also known as the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect.
17. Different methods you use to retain information have varying levels of effectiveness. This is an example of the levels-of-processing effect.
18. A small percentage of items on a long list are remembered but the longer the list, the more total items you’ll remember due to the list-length effect.
19. Reviewing Memorized testing material frequently improves your ability to remember things in general. This is known as testing effect.
20. People perceive an experience as the sum of it’s average at it’s peak (e.g. really good or really bad) and how it ended. This bias is known as the peak-end effect. Recollection example: It was fun until the power went out and the dinosaurs escaped
and almost ate us. This bias can cause small wins/positive moments to go undocumented and could cause you miss out on more momentum.
21. If you see an item on a list and hear it spoken out loud we are more likely to remember it. If you see something in it’s written form vs. hearing it spoken aloud, you will be less likely to remember it. This is an example of the modality effect.
22. Misinformation affects your recollection of events as well. If you are handed an “official report” on an event you participated in your experienced, the information in the report can affect your own account of the event. This is known as misinformation
effect. A conspiracy theorist might think of it as the Men In Black effect, the story you’re told to make you feel confused and cover-up what really happened. In the work place, when an employee quits, management and human resources often spin different stories
about how events occurred.
23. Those moments when you confuse which actor or character said a famous line or you confuse names with faces. Or perhaps you remember you know something but forget the source the”why” or “where” you know it from. These are examples of
confusion induced bias is an example of misattribution.
24. You remember things that persist in our head such as recurring nightmares and dreams. This is a bias of persistence.
25. Illustrated concepts, those captured via pictures are much more likely to be remembered than those presented in written form. This is due to the picture superiority effect. You are hard wired to experience things visually. This explains why you can recite every Star Wars movie or recall every scene of The Princess Bride verbatim, but forget text from your chemistry book back in your high school days.
26. There is a tendency to remember things that you perceive that you are good at, or better than others at, and you also remember things that you are bad at, are less than average. You can thank and curse the placement bias for this phenomenon.
27. You are more likely to remember items at the end of a list, followed by the beginning, and lastly middle. The items in the middle of the list are least likely to be remembered. This is a combination of the biases of Primacy effect, Recency effect & Serial position effect.
28. Things that seem overly complicated or difficult are harder to remember. This is an example of the processing difficulty effect. If you perceive remembering something as easy or very possible, you’ll have an easier time remembering it. Perception counts!
29. Remembering the glory days of adolescence and early adulthood is said to be an example of the reminiscence bump. Though society today may frown upon re-living the glory days, it doesn’t mean you should stop celebrating them and using them as
footholds to help you climb to new heights and future victories.
30. Self-serving bias is when you perceive yourself as responsible for all of the good outcomes but conveniently not responsible for any of the bad outcomes.
31. Source Confusion- misattributing the source of a memory, e.g. misremembering that one saw an event personally when actually it was seen on television.
32. Spacing effect: that information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a longer span of time.
33. Stereotypical bias: memory distorted towards stereotypes, e.g. “black-sounding” names being misremembered as names of criminals.
34. Telescoping effect: the tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
35. Tip of the tongue-When you are able to recall parts of an event or related information, but can’t recall the whole thing.This is thought to be an example of “blocking” where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other. This is called tip of the tongue phenomenon.
36. The “gist” of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording. This is called the Verbatim effect.
37. Remembering an item that sticks out is more compared to other items is an example of the Von Restorff effect. A list of power tools with the word “banana” in there will likely earn attention and a spot in your memory.
38. The tendency to remember projects or tasks that are incomplete or were interrupted vs. remembering completed tasks is an example of the Zeigarnik effect.

early attachment styles and why they matter

The attachment style we develop as infants has lasting affects on how we interact with others as adults. It can be troubling to think that your attachment to your mother may have have been less than perfect as a baby. It may even be troubling to give into the old psychology cliché that it all goes back to childhood and to risk blaming all your current troubles on your mother. For the record that is not what we are implying here, certainly we are not predestined based purely on our early development. But what we are suggesting is that childhood matters...and it is useful to consider when trying to understand some of our current adult tendencies.
There is considerable support for attachment theory and below is an article from an infancy blog detailing the theory and its implications for adult therapy. It's worth a read and may clarify some patterns you may have observed in yourself or in a loved one.

 

 

How the Bowlby Attachment Theory applies to Early Childhood and Adult Therapy

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Attachment can be defined as the lifelong need human beings have for affectional ties with significant other human beings (Ainsworth, 1982; 1989). Harlow (Harlow & Zimmerman, 1959) in his research with rhesus monkeys demonstrated that attachment is not dependent on the need for food. While attachment theory may be included in a psychodynamic and psychoanalytic framework, it is based on clinical enquiry,ethological evidence and scientific research (Berk, 2003), in contrast to Freud’s theory and classical object relations theory based on drive theories of human nature (Corey, 1996). It is not within the scope of this article to describe similarities and differences between Freud’s structural theory and the subsequent development of attachment theory out of object relations theory; however, comparisons may be made in order to explicate attachment theory more clearly. Although much of the research on attachment has focused on infants and children, attachment theory is also applicable to adults in a psychodynamic framework, as attachment patterns tend to remain stable through to adulthood (Hesse 1991; Fonagy, 1991).

Domains of Attachment Theory and Therapy

Attachment theory was initiated by the work of Bowlby (1969), who, inspired by ethological research on imprinting behaviour (Lorenz, 1952) and critical periods (Katz, 1999), argued that attachment to a primary caregiver is a biological need essential for the survival of the species by ensuring safety and developmental maturation. Current research by Schore (2001) confirms the biological necessity of a secure attachment relationship on the development the regulation of affect and mental health of the right brain from late pregnancy to 2 years of age. Attachment, according to both Schore (2001) and Bowlby (1969), is adaptive, and optimal development occurs in an environment of safety where affect synchrony, resonance and attachment communications can occur between an infant and his caregiver/mother. This maternal infant mutuality encourages social responsiveness thus enhancing the infant’s future potential for survival.
Holmes (2001) has identified six domains across which attachment relations occur, described as follows:
1. Secure Base and Attachment Styles
Infant behaviour is characterized by seeking proximity to the caregiver. When this behaviour does not elicit caregiving responses, behaviour follows a specific sequence ie protest-despair-detachment. If the attachment figure reestablishes contact, protest will be interrupted and proximity sought with the caregiver.  A mother/caregiver regulates interpersonal experiences of her infant by being responsive, assisting the infant to modulate stress when ‘ruptures’ in the attachment bond occur, such as when a mother is separated or temporarily out of synchrony with the infant’s needs. Ainsworth and colleagues (1978) designed a study to measure the quality of attachment between young children and their mothers (The Strange Situation) and identified 3 attachment patterns. This was supplemented by subsequent research (Main & Solomon 1999), which identified a 4th pattern, namely:
  • Secure Attachment: A secure infant will explore in the presence of parent, be visibly and audibly upset when separation occurs and will reinitiate and maintain contact when parent returns, followed by resuming play.
  • Avoidant Attachment: The infant fails to cry on separation from parent and ignores parent after reunion. Affect seems flat and contact with parent is not actively sought.
  • Resistant/Ambivalent Attachment: Infants may fail to explore before separation occurs, and display anger and aggressive responses when the parent returns after separation. The infant will not resume play.
  • Disorganised/Disoriented Attachment: Contradictory behaviours such as gaze aversion while crying and clinging or flat affect while approaching parent.
The capacity to separate without undue anxiety in the absence of an attachment figure is a signature of secure attachment.  People with Insecure attachment styles do not cope as well with loss or separation and this may hamper the open responsiveness required both in marital relationships and mother-infant dyads. Insecure attachment models may be modified by new interactional experiences that facilitate safety and promote trust (Johnson & Greenberg 1995) and can be applied through community intervention programmes at the maternal infant dyad interface, such as the Perinatal Mental Health Service at Mowbray Maternity Hospital. Similarly, in therapy, a therapist will attempt to create a safe milieu by being attuned and responsive to the client’s needs, but will also hold the space between them, modulating affective behaviour.
2. Exploration and Play
Ainsworth (1974) commented that infants who have been responded to sensitively and held frequently and affectionately during the early months, cry less towards the end of the first year and are able to play happily and explore their environment.  As Schore(2001) states,
“Attachment is not just the establishment of security after a dysregulating experience and a stressful negative state, it is also the interactive amplification of positive affects, as in play states…..creates ….a positively charged curiosity that fuels the burgeoning self’s exploration of novel socioemotional and physical environments”.
In the context of any attachment relationship, the capacity to enjoy relating to or playing with someone is indicative of healthy secure relationship. A mother who can play with her infant is both giving and receiving pleasure in the reciprocity of the interaction. Similarly, in sexual relationships, the ability to interact as a companion, to give and receive mutual pleasure without losing one’s sense of self forms a basis for secure attachment and interdependence. In the therapy situation, the pleasure of having a secure base is interspersed with exploring the real world outside of therapy.
3. Protest and Anger
Anger is a response to separation and can become despair if the attachment figure is not restored. In fact, an infant will exhibit protest–despair behaviour from birth if separated from the maternal milieu or habitat  (Alberts, 1994; Christenson at al, 1995).  Anger or hostility towards a caregiver, according to Bowlby (1998:296), is best understood as a response to frustration, but because it is repressed or redirected the ‘balance of responses towards an attachment figure can become greatly distorted and tangled’. Bowlby (1973) observed that anger is a frequent response to loss and goes so far as to say,
“the most violently angry and dysfunctional responses of all are elicited in children and adolescents who not only experience repeated separations but are constantly subjected to the threat of being abandoned”.
  When threats are used to discipline children it also induces anger at the caregiver, which is suppressed so as not to disrupt the relationship (adaptation). In psychoanalytic language, this act of repressing may become ‘secure base’ if the attachment figure is repeatedly threatening. A client in therapy may bring with them their unconscious childhood attachment style, both a clue to the client’s early history and an opportunity through transference and counter transference for the therapist to address the client’s wound. The therapeutic relationship provides an opportunity for the client to find and name their feelings of protest or despair with respect to losses in the past and/or present and to discover and repair what Balint (1979) calls the “basic fault” in the context of a safe relationship.
4. Loss
Robertson and Bowlby (1952) identified three phases of separation response: protest related to separation anxiety, despair (related to grief and mourning) and detachment (related to defence mechanisms, especially repression). Bowlby (1960) believed that when a caregiver continues to be unavailable to the infant, or when the succession of primary the attachment figure is too frequent, protest-despair responses will result in detachment and may affect the infant’s ability to form interdependent and caring relationships in life. Bowlby and another  colleague (Bowlby & Parkes, 1970) categorized four phases children and adults experience in the grieving process: a) numbness, b) yearning and protest, c) disorganization and despair, and d) repair and reorganization. Remembering and grieving losses that occurred in the past is a crucial part of any therapeutic process.
5. Internal Working Models
The concept of ‘internal working models’ akin to cybernetic information systems infers pragmatism and yet may be likened to the use of schemata in cognitive therapy or the introjection of an object intrapsychically in object relations psychoanalysis. Internal working models of the self and attachment figures are acquired through interactions with attachment figures. Bowlby (1973) proposed that firstly, when a person is confident that an attachment figure is available, he is less prone to fear responses, that secondly, this confidence is established  throughout childhood, particularly in infancy and once established remains stable throughout life, and thirdly that styles of relating to others are accurate reflections of experiences in early relationships.
If the attachment figure is responsive and protective while at the same time respecting the need to grow and explore the environment, the infant will develop an internal working model of self as deserving and dependable. However, if the caregiver/parent rejects or ignores calls for comfort and attention and prohibits exploratory activity, the infant is more likely to construct an internal working model of himself as unworthy and ineffectual.
6. Reflexivity and narrative competence
The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) devised by Mary Main (Main & Goldwyn, 1995) is a psychotherapeutic questionnaire that assesses the style and form of linguistic responses to attachment related questions. It reveals that how people narrate their experiences indicates their attachment style, and that these styles correspond to the attachment styles identified in the Strange Situation by Ainsworth (1974).
Secure adults speak coherently, place a high value on attachment and describe experiences and relationships consistently, regardless of whether they were satisfying or not.  Ambivalent or preoccupied adults recount their past experiences in an emotional and haphazard way i.e. there is no clear or coherent picture. An avoidant adult may not remember, dismisses, normalizes and generalizes descriptions of attachment relationships and is not coherent. A disorganized adult will lose track of coherent thoughts or feelings about loss or abuse, and may lapse into prolonged silence or monologues. Disorganized infants or adults may also exhibit any of the above three attachment style tendencies.
Holmes (2001) states ‘therapy is an in vivo experience in which the patient learns to become self-reflexive”. The ability of clients to reflect on their narratives, their feelings and thoughts in a meta-cognitive way can be encouraged and developed in the therapy process of deconstruction and reconstruction of narratives. By enlarging the client’s capacity to rework internal working models he may be enabled to confound, change and reconstruct his outdated narrative.

The Therapeutic Process

The overall goal in attachment therapy is to reappraise internal working models of the self in relation to attachment figures. This may be difficult if parents have not allowed children to view the parent’s own working models neither allowed their children to review their own working models (Bowlby, 1988). A client in therapy may bring these rigid internal models of attachment to therapy and impose these models on his relationship with the therapist (transference in psychoanalytic language). Clients with ambivalent attachment patterns may feel hostile towards the therapist (transference) in the course of therapy and confronting and containing these feelings without destroying the relationship is part of the therapeutic task. It is important for the therapist to be aware of her own feelings (counter-transference), to utilize these creatively in navigating the relationship and explore with the client a means of reworking internal working models.
An important function of a therapist in the attachment theory framework is to provide a secure base for the client. Forming a therapeutic alliance, creating a relationship of trust, listening and responding attentively, steadying the clients displaced feelings are all characteristics of providing a safe, secure space. It is in this context that an insecurely attached person may be willing to risk replacing avoidant, ambivalent or disorganized patterns of relating and reconstruct a secure base narrative (Holmes 2001). The therapist aims to behave differently to the client’s previous attachment figures, create a holding environment for the clients ‘unsafe’ feelings to emerge, so that intimacy, exploration and ultimately autonomy can occur. The pattern of regular appointments coupled with a secure-attachment base will help the client repair ‘ruptures of the bond’ and learn to modulate their own affective responses.
These therapeutic aims may call on an eclectic mix of techniques, such as Rogerian person centered listening skills (Corey, 2001), working with feelings to access, validate, reprocess and restructure responses, and reframe and restructure her internal working models of disorganized attachment.