Molly McDonough
3.9.2008
I thought a lot about what Aidan said last class about why flashbulb memories aren’t present in situations of happiness, or surprises of joy. I’m not even sure these readings explain the answer. The only solution I could come up with is that happiness is something universally understood, people make us happy, music makes us happy and for whatever reason happiness is communal. It is very easy to say, I am happy because of… and therefore I think happiness lives in the moment.
Stress and sadness on the other hand are indicative to the person. Sadness during a certain event can be based on a history of sadness linked to something/someone in the past, or related circumstances to something more personal. And when I look bad I remember more of the times I’ve cried over things, than the times I have laughed. That is sad. But I was talking to Kaila and I think we agreed it could go the opposite way as well.
The chapter in LeDoux focuses on the effects of anxiety and how anxiety, stress, and fear play a role in the making of memories. I was struck by the concept of fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli. Snakes are still a more effective stimulus for fear, even more so than guns and knives. What?? How many people have even come across a snake? A gun or a knife? This is disturbing, we have not evolved to fear these tools of destruction when they are much more available in our society than snakes. Maybe media is the anti-anxiety drug we have been taking to eliminate our stresses, and the more we see the less we fear.
Chapter 4 of McGaugh begins with the question of whether or not people would give their children memory enhancements if they didn’t have a learning disability. I don’t know. Isn’t having a good memory a part of our personality? Should everyone have a good memory? What are all these things we need to remember so readily? I’m not sure people would get along as well as they do if we remembered everything we told one another. McGaugh leads into FBM as well, mentioning Brown and Kulik. He went over the categories in the descriptions and the details of what makes a FBM different. FBM is all about the details, even though our reaction to a tragedy is described as “emotions evoked,” is it even about our emotions or the reaction to the emotions of others?
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2 comments:
Sylviane
I was very interested in the idea that emotional state, particularly mood, can affect judgments, as was presented in the paper by Clore and Huntsinger. For example, when participants listened to sad music (which is assumed to cause a sad mood) while standing at the bottom of a steep hill they are about to climb, they overestimate the incline. Although I understand that the effects of negative moods are probably more easily to measure, the study seemed to focus on the affect sadness caused on judgments. This made me wonder if happy moods would lead to a more appropriate and accurate judgment or one that was exaggerated; if a person was listening to happy music at the bottom of the hill, would they correctly estimate the incline or would the underestimate it? In this article, I was also intrigued by the idea that sad moods decrease the incidence of false memories and forgetting. In the context of the paper, it seemed as if they were talking about the mood during questioning, but I am curious what affect mood during the creation of the memory has on the incidence of false memories and forgetting.
To the contrary, I think media does it's fair share of manufacturing fear! In particular, what can we make of the environmental alarms we're all facing? Do such concerns need to be conditioned- or consciously examined- in order for us to feel powered by a type of instinctual fear?
One woman, Natalie Jeremijenko, has begun to address this need for change. (You might have heard her talk before at SLC.) A website states:
"Have you recently experienced a heightened awareness of environmental concerns? Common symptoms may include: nausea, depression, feelings of helplessness, and increased fear of the words “polar,” “ice,” and “caps.” While there is as yet no cure for this condition, specialist Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko, of NYU’s Environmental Health Clinic, might be able to help. Since the clinic’s launch in February, Dr. Jeremijenko, along with her trained assistants, has been addressing the environmental anxieties of its visitors."
Follow the link to learn that she's actually an environ-mental artist with a PhD... and this project is actually a part of NYU's Art Dept, not school of Public Health.
Anyway, her work came to mind during these readings (especially p 236 LeDoux) because another one of her projects was to re-program toy dogs that would sniff out toxic waste on former-industrial-sites-turned-playgrounds.
In light of my other research this week (on mirror neurons and neuroplasticity) I can't help but wonder if children would eventually begin to adopt this "sniffing" capacity... thus becoming more fearful of new dangers in our ever-changing environment?
http://www.goodmagazine.com
/section/Portraits/mad_scientist
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