Winkielman P, Schwarz N
Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, CO 80208, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2001 Mar;12(2):176-9. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00330.
People's beliefs about how memory works can affect their inferences from experienced difficulty of recall. Participants were asked to recall either 4 childhood events (experienced as an easy task) or 12 childhood events (experienced as a difficult task). Subsequently, they were led to believe that either pleasant or unpleasant periods of one's life fade from memory. When the recall task was difficult (12 events), participants who believed that memories from unpleasant periods fade away rated their childhood as less happy than participants who believed that memories from pleasant periods fade away. The opposite pattern was observed when the recall task was easy (4 events). This interplay of recall experiences and memory beliefs suggests that the judgmental impact of subjective experiences is shaped by beliefs about their meaning. It also suggests that the recall difficulty in clinical memory work may lead a person to make negative inferences about his or her childhood, provided the person shares the popular belief that memory represses negative information.
人们对于记忆如何运作的信念会影响他们从回忆的难易经历中得出的推断。参与者被要求回忆4件童年事件（被视为一项轻松的任务）或12件童年事件（被视为一项困难的任务）。随后，他们被引导去相信人生中愉快或不愉快的时期会从记忆中消退。当回忆任务困难时（12件事件），那些相信不愉快时期的记忆会消退的参与者对自己童年的幸福程度评价比那些相信愉快时期的记忆会消退的参与者更低。当回忆任务轻松时（4件事件），观察到了相反的模式。回忆经历与记忆信念之间的这种相互作用表明，主观体验的判断影响是由对其意义的信念塑造的。这也表明，在临床记忆工作中，回忆困难可能会导致一个人对自己的童年做出负面推断，前提是这个人认同记忆会压抑负面信息这一普遍观念。
