Active Forgetting Pain And Events Of Pain

After suffering from traumatic events,such as earthquakes,traffic accident and so on,individuals often tend to experience a strong sense of pain.It may lead to physical and psychological dysfunction and decreased immunity,and it also has negative impacts on patients’ mental and psychological health,thereby seriously affecting individuals’ quality of life and work efficiency.Therefore,there is a strong motivation to forget the unpleasant experiences of life,and such a process of forgetting is called motivated forgetting,which was defined as the ability to suppress the unwanted memories though by the motivated top-down control.Think/no-think paradigm(TNT)is a classic experimental paradigm for the study of motivated forgetting.It mainly includes the study phase,the TNT phase and the testing phase.Among them,the TNT phase is the key phase to the success of the whole experiment,which including recall tasks and suppressed tasks.TNT Paradigm mainly investigates the negative control effect of memroy,which indicates that the memory performance of suppressed items was significantly below the baseline.In recent years,a plenty of TNT studies have consistently proved that memory suppression can produce negative control effect,which indicateed that it was possible to study motivated forgetting in laboratory situations.In addition,clinical studies have shown that both normal individuals and individuals with PTSD(post-traumatic stress disorder)can successfully suppress certain ideological content.Moreover,people who have recently suffered from disasters can successfully suppress negative materials,which related to his disaster experience.In addition,some studies also found that patients with acute pain were better able to forget recent painful memory than healthy people.However,there are no studies about motivated forgetting with the combination of TNT and pain under the laboratory conditions.Therefore,this is the first study in laboratory conditions,combining the TNT paradigm and pain stimuli,to explore whether memory control effect could be induced successfully under the pain or the memory of pain.The study included two progressive researches: 1)In the case of memory of pain,to explore the memory control effect of event related pain and memory of pain;2)Under the pain and memory of pain,to explore the memory control effect of neutral events、events related pain and memory of pain.This study included two researches involving four experiments,and 122 participants were recruited in total.Research I was composed of an experiment with 2*3 experiment.In the learning phase,participants were asked to learn 48 pictures-word-pain pairs;In the TNT phase,participants were asked to suppress the 1/3 pairs(keep thinking nothing),and to recall 1/ 3 pairs(recall the words and the intensity of the pain),and the remaining 1/3 pairs were baseline;In the test phase,only pictures were presented and the participants were asked to recall the corresponding words and pain intensity.Research II were consisted of three experiments,including two 2*3 experiments and a controlled experiment.The process of each experiment was similar to research I,which was divided into the learning phase,the TNT phase and the testing phase.But the three experiments received different experimental manipulations.In the learning phase:(1)In the experiment I,we only asked participants to remember words without no pain stimuli;(2)In the experiment II,we asked participants only to remember words too,but accompanied by pain stimuli when the words appeared;(3)In the experiment III,participants were asked to remember both the words and the pain intensity;(4)In the recall task of TNT phase,all participants were asked to recall the words,but ignoring the pain stimuli,while in the suppression task,participants were asked to do nothing;In the testing phase,participants of experiment I and experiment II were asked to recall the words only,but participants of the experiment III were asked to recall both the words and the pain intensity.The results of research I showed that:(1)We have not observed significant negative control effect and positive control effect of events related pain;(2)As for the correct rate of memory of pain,there was no significant memory control effect;(3)Different pain intensity would affect participants’ unpleasantness of the pictures.As for the pictures which linked with high pain intensity,participants felt more unpleasant than pictures with low pain intensity.The results of research II showed that:(1)In the experiment I,the negative control effect of neutral events was successfully induced;(2)The memory of pain and the pain had different influences on TNT.In the experiment II,the negative control effect of the events related pain could be induced successfully in the case of low pain.But in the experimental III,the negative control effect of the events related pain could be induced only in the case of high memory of pain,moreover after the TNT phase,according to our results,we did not observed significant memory control effect about memory of pain.(3)Pain and memory of pain would differently affect participants’ unpleasantness of the pictures.As for the pictures which linked with different intensity of pain,there was no difference of pictures’ unpleasantness between high pain and low pain,but there was a positive control effect of the pictures’ unpleasantness.Moreover,as for the pictures which linked with memory of pain,participants could clearly remember the intensity of pain,but there was no significant memory control effect of pictures’ unpleasantness.Results from the study indicated that,we could not only repeat the results of previous researches,that was,using the TNT paradigm,memory control effects of neutral events could be induced successfully,but also demonstrated that memory control effects of events of pain could be induced successfully under the pain and the memory of pain.What’s more,the pain and the memory of pain differently influenced the memory control effect.In summary,this study repeated the results of previous researches,more importantly,our study was first to integrate the suppression of memory with the combination of the pain stimuli and TNT paradigm in the laboratory conditions,and further explored the differences of pain and memory of pain to the process of motivated forgetting.Finally,because the ability of memory inhibition can represent individuals’ mental health,future researches on the motivated forgetting of pain will broad clinical applications to mental diseases such as PTSD and psychological amnesia.