How good are you at forgetting?

Yes, forgetting is a skill.  And it’s just like any other skill – it can be improved with training and practice.  But, day to day, we rarely think of it as a skill worth developing.

Well, think again.

Memory, of course, is forgetting’s polar opposite, and is widely praised as a human skill.  But when was the last time you heard someone declare this New Year’s Resolution: “This year, I’m going to learn how to forget.” 

A new book titled “Memory: Fragments of a Modern History”, and an article published last month in Scientific American, explore the delicate relationship between memory and mental health. It charts our centuries-old love affair with memory and focuses attention on research over the last two decades that challenges the long-held Freudian view that mental health is always improved by remembering.  Indeed, in certain cases, a person might be better off learning to forget. 

The most dramatic examples, of course, deal with violence – veterans returning home from war, women subjected to domestic violence, crimes perpetrated against our fellow man.  In cases like these, some experts insist that learning to forget is the healthier approach.   Both the book and the SA article explain that beginning in the 1990s, neuroscience researchers began to challenge age-old concepts about memory.  This new wave of research led to a fresh approach for dealing with traumatic memories.  And research over the last 20 years appears to support many of these approaches – with experts providing patients with techniques to help them forget. 

Three such techniques include: thought substitution (pre-planning a thought to focus on when the negative memory arrives), memory suppression (learning to block the thought) and activation (taking a specific pre-planned action – say, pressing a button on a computer – when negative thoughts appear; said cognitive psychologist Tracy Tomlinson, who was quoted in the Scientific American article: “Action interferes with recollection”).  Each method has been shown to be effective over time, through repetition and training.

But is forgetting a cop-out?  After all, isn’t it important that we remember the past, both to honor it and grow from it?  Perhaps.  But perhaps not in all cases. Certainly, knowing what’s worth remembering and what’s worth forgetting is important, and calls upon our ethical standing.  But, used judiciously, learning how to forget can probably go a long way to improve a person’s mental health. 

And that might be something worth remembering. 

Does fantasizing about the future help us achieve it?

Apparently not, according to researchers who claim that positive fantasies about the future actually backfire because they reduce our energy to pursue them.  The research substantiates recent findings that visualizing positive outcomes – for years thought to lead to positive outcomes – diminishes the chances of reaching one’s goal.  This new study explains why: it reduces our energy to achieve them. 

They “make energy seem unnecessary,” according to study authors Heather Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen, who were quoted in Research Digest, a blog from The British Psychological Society.  Kappes and Oettingen explain that “by allowing people to consummate a desired future,” energy is diminished in that, according to BPS: “positive fantasies trigger the relaxation that would normally accompany actual achievement, rather than marshaling the energy needed to obtain it.”  The researchers demonstrated this process, across four studies. 

They concluded: "Instead of promoting achievement, positive fantasies will sap job-seekers of the energy to pound the pavement, and drain the lovelorn of the energy to approach the one they like." The authors further explained: "Fantasies that are less positive - that question whether an ideal future can be achieved, and that depict obstacles, problems and setbacks - should be more beneficial for mustering the energy needed to obtain success."

The question remains, is there any benefit whatsoever to positive fantasies.  The BPS blog entry suggests: “From a survival perspective, if a goal, such as food or water, is unobtainable, there could be some advantage to enjoying a fantasy that switches you into a low-energy mode. Similarly, if a task fills you with dread and your short-term goal is relaxation, then indulging in positive fantasies about desired outcomes could be a way to reduce anxiety.”

When it comes to sex, who do teens trust more? Parents or friends?

This might surprise you . . . but it’s their parents.  In a national online study, researchers from the University of Montreal found that 45% of teenagers consider their parents to be their sexuality role model, compared with 32% who looked to their friends.  Another 15% named celebrities as their sexual role model.

Interestingly, 78% of the mothers who participated in the study believed that their children modeled their friends’ sexual behavior.  Co-author Dr. Jean Frappier said this means that “parents seem to underestimate their role and the impact they have.”  Frappier added: “Health professionals and the media have an important role to play in empowering parents and enabling them to increase their communications with their children with regards to sexual health issues.”

According to a press release from the University of Montreal, “the survey also revealed that many of the teenagers who look to their parents live in families where sexuality is openly discussed, and that moreover, teenagers in these families have a greater awareness of the risks and consequences of sexually transmitted infections.” Added Frappier: “Good communication within families and especially around sexual health issues is associated with more responsible behaviours.” 

The survey involved 1,139 mothers of teenagers and 1,171 youths between 14 and 17 years old.

Does your memory diminish when you walk through a doorway?

It sounds so strange, but it’s true. When you walk through a doorway, your memory suffers. But why? Researchers say that it has to do with “event boundaries”, that is, the effect has more to do with physical space than how that information is encoded. So when you walk through a doorway you’re entering a new physical space, and this triggers your brain to update its memory and create a new “memory episode.”

In all, three experiments were conducted, by Gabriel A. Radvansky , Sabine A. Krawietz & Andrea K. Tamplin of Notre Dame’s Dept. of Psychology. Study participants were asked to remember objects in a room, then recall them at a later time. A study summary, published by BPS’ Research Digest, stated: “The key finding is that memory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room.”

Experiment #1 was in a 55-room virtual setting where participants were asked to enter a room, pick up an object from a table (the object would disappear once they picked it up), then deposit that object at another table – sometimes in the same room, sometimes in a new room. Participants were asked to recall the object that they were carrying. When researchers discovered the memory lapse from passing through a doorway, they wondered if the virtual setting might be the cause. Enter experiment #2, a real-life network of rooms. Same elements, same result – participants were more skilled at recalling objects when they remained in the same room.

The question now was: perhaps this odd memory effect had to do with context, that is, that recall was linked to “where” they picked up the object (i.e., where they originally encoded it into their memory). Researchers asked: is it easier to recall an object/idea based on where you first learned it? (author’s note: reading about “context”, I immediately thought about when I misplace my keys, and my tendency to return to the place that I last remembered them). Researchers tested the context hypothesis, by allowing participants to return to the room in which they originally encoded the memory, but again found no substantive difference. Their conclusion? Crossing through a doorway does indeed alter memory. In fact, the study found that the more rooms a person visited, they weaker their memory became.

Implications? Hmmm, hard to fathom, but perhaps if you’re putting away the Christmas decorations in a new location, you just might want to hang out in that room a bit longer, to make sure that the memory is fully encoded. After all, once you leave the room, a new memory episode begins.

Cooperation: Why do humans help each other?

In a unique study aimed at learning how to maximize human cooperation, researchers at Carlos III University of Madrid discovered the following:

·         An estimated 5% of people always try to help their neighbors;

·         An estimated 35% never do; and

·         The remaining 60% cooperate depending on their mood or according to how their neighbor has behaved previously. 

In a posting at psypost.org earlier this year, study author Professor Jose A. Cuesta was quoted as saying: “We have proved that in general, decisions regarding cooperation do not reflect so much economic incentives as much as they do the fact that the individuals with whom they interact cooperate or not.”  The authors point out that the study’s findings have implications across all fields, and can be used to optimize collaboration and innovation networks, where large groups of people or companies participate in a common task.  “In these cases,” explained Angel Sanchez, a co-author also quoted in the psypost.org story: “We must foment a generally cooperative atmosphere for the participants, which then has implications for the size of work groups and the need for timely incentives in order to avoid falling into a non-cooperative mind set.”

The psypost.org story explained these details of the experiment: The question at hand was determining if, in a dilemma where someone would have to choose between cooperating or not with other people who were connected through a network, a situation could be achieved in which all or most of the people collaborated. The theories and the computer simulations did not offer a univocal response and in many cases made contradictory predictions; because of this these scientists decided to carry out an experiment with real individuals. For this purpose, the researchers asked for volunteers among the student body at the UC3M Leganés campus and had them then interact through a computer program so that they could see the people with whom they had to cooperate (while keeping their anonymity at all times).

The psypost.org story added the following: In the instructions given to 169 participants in this experiment, words such as cooperate, betray, or let down were not employed in order to avoid inducing certain behavior – instead, choices were indicated by colors. During each round, a player obtained a certain benefit for their choice according to what their neighbors had chosen and he/she was informed what the others had done or won. The interaction was repeated a certain number of rounds and in two different situations; one in which the neighbors were always the same and another in which they changed after each round. “In this way,” the researchers pointed out, “we were able to compare the result when there was an established contact network with what happens when there is not and the individuals interact with different groups.”

The study was performed by Professor Cuesta, Full Professor Angel Sanchez (both with the Mathematics Department at UC3M), a team of researchers from the National University of Distance Learning in Spain and the Universidad Catolica del Norte in Antogasgasta, Chile.  The study was published earlier this year in journal PLoS ONE. 

Is there a link between credit scores and personality?

Yes there is, but not what you might think. 

Given that credit scores play such a significant role in U.S. hiring – a 2010 poll found that 60% of U.S. employers conduct some form of credit check on prospective employees - researchers from LSU, Texas Tech University and Northern Illinois University set out to examine the link between credit scores and personality, job performance and harmful workplace behaviors (e.g., cheating, stealing). Their findings:

·         Personality: interestingly, agreeableness is negatively related to a person’s credit score.  Explained lead researcher Jeremy Bernerth (as quoted in an LSU web site report): “With regards to personality and credit – it makes sense that conscientiousness is related to good credit, but what was really interesting was that agreeableness was negatively related to your credit score. . . .  That suggests easy-going individuals actually have worse credit scores than disagreeable and rude individuals.  This suggests that agreeable individuals might get themselves in trouble by co-signing loans for friends or family or taking out additional credit cards at the suggestion of store clerks.”

·         Harmful workplace behavior: the LSU report said that “contrary to what many employers consider common knowledge and practice, the researchers found no correlation between poor credit scores and bad behavior on the job.” Said Bernerth, in the LSU report: “It was telling that poor credit scores were not correlated to theft and other deviant types of work behaviors . . . .Most companies attempt to justify the use of credit scores because they think such employees will end up stealing, but our research suggests that might not be the case.”

·         Job performance: Not surprisingly, Bernerth and fellow researchers found a positive link between high credit scores and what he terms “task performance” and “citizenship behavior,” according to a Time magazine article. Bernerth’s team found that people with higher credit scores were better both at task performance as well as citizenship behavior. “It’s really about consistency,” said Bernerth, quoted in Time. “We’re all driven towards consistency. If we’re being reliable and dependable in terms of our financial behavior, there’s a consistency in us that drives us towards those sorts of behaviors on the job.”

Bernerth also pointed out, as quoted in Time:

·         Just 35% of your credit score - “If you look at what actually goes into a credit score, only 35 percent of it is your repayment history,” said Bernerth, other factors include unemployment or other hardships (e.g., medical). The other 65% has to do with length of credit history and type of debt, factors that Bernerth told Time aren’t necessarily predictive of a job seeker’s performance. Bernerth told Time: “[Employers] are talking about it as if a credit report or a credit score is a proxy of personality. . . . There’s some truth to that but there’s a lot more involved. There’s so much more in there I don’t know that that’s an accurate comparison.”

Learning new faces: at what age does this ability peak?

Does it peak at age 11?   65?   4?   19?   31? 

Researchers at Harvard and Dartmouth, in a study published earlier this year, found that the mental ability to recognize new faces peaks at age 31 – far later than many would suspect, according to the study’s authors.  The study set out to disprove a common notion that cognitive abilities peak in the early twenties. 
Gathering data from over 60,000 participants, the study traced the ability to learn new faces from pre-adolescence through middle age and, in three separate experiments, found that face-learning ability improves until just after age 30, even though other related cognitive abilities (name recognition and inverted face recognition, which both peaked in the early 20s), peaked earlier. 

The study’s authors said that their data “provide the first behavioral evidence for late maturation of face processing and the dissociation of face recognition from other abilities over time”, adding that this “demonstrates that studies on adult age development can provide insight into the organization and development of cognitive systems.”  

The study was co-authored by Laura T. Germinea (Harvard), Bradley Duchaineb (Dartmouth) and Ken Nakayamaa (Harvard).