Anderson M C, Green C
Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene 97403-1227, USA.
Nature. 2001 Mar 15;410(6826):366-9. doi: 10.1038/35066572.
Freud proposed that unwanted memories can be forgotten by pushing them into the unconscious, a process called repression. The existence of repression has remained controversial for more than a century, in part because of its strong coupling with trauma, and the ethical and practical difficulties of studying such processes in controlled experiments. However, behavioural and neurobiological research on memory and attention shows that people have executive control processes directed at minimizing perceptual distraction, overcoming interference during short and long-term memory tasks and stopping strong habitual responses to stimuli. Here we show that these mechanisms can be recruited to prevent unwanted declarative memories from entering awareness, and that this cognitive act has enduring consequences for the rejected memories. When people encounter cues that remind them of an unwanted memory and they consistently try to prevent awareness of it, the later recall of the rejected memory becomes more difficult. The forgetting increases with the number of times the memory is avoided, resists incentives for accurate recall and is caused by processes that suppress the memory itself. These results show that executive control processes not uniquely tied to trauma may provide a viable model for repression.
弗洛伊德提出， unwanted memories可以通过将它们推入无意识状态而被遗忘，这个过程称为压抑。压抑的存在在一个多世纪以来一直存在争议，部分原因是它与创伤紧密相连，以及在对照实验中研究此类过程存在伦理和实际困难。然而，关于记忆和注意力的行为及神经生物学研究表明，人们拥有执行控制过程，旨在最大限度地减少感知干扰、克服短期和长期记忆任务中的干扰，并停止对刺激的强烈习惯性反应。我们在此表明，这些机制可以被用来防止 unwanted declarative memories进入意识，并且这种认知行为对被拒绝的记忆有持久影响。当人们遇到提醒他们 unwanted memory的线索，并且他们持续试图阻止对其的意识时，随后对被拒绝记忆的回忆变得更加困难。遗忘随着避免记忆的次数增加而增加，抵制准确回忆的动机，并且是由抑制记忆本身的过程引起的。这些结果表明，并非与创伤唯一相关的执行控制过程可能为压抑提供一个可行的模型。
