Preliminary Evidence That Stress Makes Negative Memories Less Distinctive, With Implications For Witness Testimony

By Matthew Warren

Stress has complicated effects on our memories. Whereas some studies have found that we are better at remembering events that occurred during stressful situations, such as while watching disturbing videos, others have shown that stress impairs memory. Now a study published in Brain and Cognition suggests that stress doesn’t influence the strength of our emotional memories at all. Instead, the researchers claim, it is the fidelity of those memories – how distinct and precise they are – that changes when we go through stressful experiences. 

Maheen Shermohammeda from Harvard University and colleagues recruited 56 young adults between 18 and 23, and asked them to view a series of negative and neutral pictures. That might seem painless enough – except that half of the participants looked at the pictures while feeling rather stressed. Before they began looking at the pictures, they were told that they would later have to give a speech to a panel of judges. To make matters worse, before seeing each block of pictures they had to complete complicated maths problems. They were given just a short time to complete these, and while doing so they were told that they were performing poorly and their data would be unusable if they didn’t do well. In contrast, the control group had a fairly relaxing time: instead of a speech, they were told they would have to write a story, and they only had to complete simple maths problems at their own pace. 

About two weeks later, all the participants were given a surprise memory task, in which they again saw the earlier pictures alongside new images they hadn’t seen before. They had to indicate whether each picture was an old one that had been in the original task or a new image they hadn’t seen before.

At several points throughout the study, all participants were asked how stressed they were, and also had their heart rate measured and saliva samples taken to analyse levels of the stress hormone cortisol. As expected, the group that went through the stressful experience reported higher levels of stress, and had increased heart rates and cortisol levels (although the team had to exclude a handful of participants who, surprisingly, didn’t report feeling stressed). 

Overall, participants in both groups were better at remembering negative images – this replicates a well-established finding that emotional material tends to be more memorable. Also, the stressed group correctly remembered just as many of the earlier images as the control group  (i.e. their “hit rate” was the same). Crucially, where the groups differed was in their patterns of “false alarms” – how often they falsely remembered new images as being from the original task. The stressed participants were more prone to false alarms for negative images compared neutral images, and the more stressed they were, the larger this difference.  The control group didn’t show any difference between the two kinds of images.

Based on these results, the researchers suggest it’s not the strength of our memories that is influenced by stress, but rather their fidelity, or how distinct they are from other information. For the stressed group, neutral memories became more distinct, making it easier to distinguish them from new neutral material, while negative memories were more vague or blurred, making it harder to distinguish them from new negative material. The results demonstrate the importance of separating out memory into its constituent parts (strength and fidelity), the researchers add, rather than just looking at overall performance or correct “hits”.

It’s clearly a rather preliminary result. The pool of participants was small to begin with, and made even smaller after the researchers had to remove those participants who didn’t respond to their stress intervention. And the participants all came from a very young, narrow age range, raising the question of whether older people respond in similar ways.

Nevertheless, the idea that stress has different effects on different components of memory is an interesting proposition that deserves further attention – particularly as understanding memory during periods of stress has important real-world implications for situations like eyewitness accounts of crimes. For example, the researchers said, a “stressed witness to [a] crime … may indeed have a strong recollection of the criminal, but may also have an impoverished ability to discriminate the assailant from other individuals in a police lineup.”

—Stress impacts the fidelity but not strength of emotional memories

Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest

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New Evidence Suggests Stress Does Not Affect The Strength Of Our Memories But Can Alter Their Fidelity (Making Them More Or Less Distinct)

By Matthew Warren

Stress has complicated effects on our memories. Whereas some studies have found that we are better at remembering events that occurred during stressful situations, such as while watching disturbing videos, others have shown that stress impairs memory. Now a study published in Brain and Cognition suggests that stress doesn’t influence the strength of our emotional memories at all. Instead, the researchers claim, it is the fidelity of those memories – how distinct and precise they are – that changes when we go through stressful experiences. 

Maheen Shermohammeda from Harvard University and colleagues recruited 56 young adults between 18 and 23, and asked them to view a series of negative and neutral pictures. That might seem painless enough – except that half of the participants looked at the pictures while feeling rather stressed. Before they began looking at the pictures, they were told that they would later have to give a speech to a panel of judges. To make matters worse, before seeing each block of pictures they had to complete complicated maths problems. They were given just a short time to complete these, and while doing so they were told that they were performing poorly and their data would be unusable if they didn’t do well. In contrast, the control group had a fairly relaxing time: instead of a speech, they were told they would have to write a story, and they only had to complete simple maths problems at their own pace. 

About two weeks later, all the participants were given a surprise memory task, in which they again saw the earlier pictures alongside new images they hadn’t seen before. They had to indicate whether each picture was an old one that had been in the original task or a new image they hadn’t seen before.

At several points throughout the study, all participants were asked how stressed they were, and also had their heart rate measured and saliva samples taken to analyse levels of the stress hormone cortisol. As expected, the group that went through the stressful experience reported higher levels of stress, and had increased heart rates and cortisol levels (although the team had to exclude a handful of participants who, surprisingly, didn’t report feeling stressed). 

Overall, participants in both groups were better at remembering negative images –this replicates a well-established finding that emotional material tends to be more memorable. Also, the stressed group correctly remembered just as many of the earlier images as the control group (i.e. their “hit rate” was the same). Crucially, where the groups differed was in their patterns of “false alarms” – how often they falsely remembered new images as being from the original task. The stressed participants were more prone to false alarms for negative images compared neutral images, and the more stressed they were, the larger this difference. The control group didn’t show any difference between the two kinds of images.

Based on these results, the researchers suggest it’s not the strength of our memories that is influenced by stress, but rather their fidelity, or how distinct they are from other information. For the stressed group, neutral memories became more distinct, making it easier to distinguish them from new neutral material, while negative memories were more vague or blurred, making it harder to distinguish them from new negative material that hadn’t been seen before. The results demonstrate the importance of separating out memory into its constituent parts (strength and fidelity), the researchers add, rather than just looking at overall performance or correct “hits”.

It’s clearly a rather preliminary result. The pool of participants was small to begin with, and made even smaller after the researchers had to remove those participants who didn’t respond to their stress intervention. And the participants all came from a very young, narrow age range, raising the question of whether older people respond in similar ways. Nevertheless, the idea that stress has different effects on different components of memory is an interesting proposition that deserves further attention – particularly as understanding memory during periods of stress has important real-world implications for situations like eyewitness accounts of crimes.

—Stress impacts the fidelity but not strength of emotional memories

Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest

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Attention Parents: Recent Neuroscience Says Your Teen Still Needs YOU

For some parents, parenting teens conjures up feelings and beliefs that raising an adolescent is challenging and fraught with conflicts and negative emotions. However, an upcoming journal article from the UC Berkeley Institute of Human Development (scheduled for publication in the July edition of Family Relations) cites neuroscience findings which indicate parents should reframe their […]

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Higher Intelligence And An Analytical Thinking Style Offer No Protection Against “The Illusory Truth Effect” – Our Tendency To Believe Repeated Claims Are More Likely To Be True

By Matthew Warren

It’s a trick that politicians have long exploited: repeat a false statement often enough, and people will start believing that it’s true. Psychologists have named this phenomenon the “illusory truth effect”, and it seems to come from the fact that we find it easier to process information that we’ve encountered many times before. This creates a sense of fluency which we then (mis)interpret as a signal that the content is true.  

Of course, you might like to believe that your particular way of thinking makes you immune to this trick. But according to a pre-print uploaded recently to PsyArXiv, you’d be wrong. In a series of experiments, Jonas De keersmaecker at Ghent University and his collaborators found that individual differences in cognition had no bearing on the strength of the illusory truth effect. 

The researchers wondered whether three aspects of cognition, already known to influence how people make judgments, could determine how prone someone is to the illusory truth effect: cognitive ability or intelligence; the need for cognitive closure (i.e. the desire to avoid ambiguity); and cognitive style (whether someone thinks in a rapid and intuitive manner or takes a slower and more analytic approach). For example, someone who relies more on intuition and wants hard-and-fast answers might be more likely to use the fact that information has been repeated as a cue to its truthfulness.

Across six experiments involving between 199 and 336 participants, the team measured the illusory truth effect while also tapping into these aspects of cognition. The exact methods varied for each study, but generally participants would first read a mix of true and false trivia statements, then complete various cognitive tests and surveys, and finally they would re-read and judge as true or false the earlier trivia statements, as well as new ones interspersed among them. A seventh study was similar but involved fake and real political headlines (the participants’ final challenge in this case was to judge which were real and which were made up).

The researchers found the illusory truth effect across all seven studies: participants were more likely to rate trivia statements and headlines as true/real if they’d seen them previously. Crucially, the strength of this effect did not vary according to the participants’ cognitive ability or style, or need for closure. (A couple of studies found some small significant associations, but these disappeared when the researchers integrated all the data.)

These results suggest that we are all predisposed to believe repeated information regardless of our own particular cognitive profile. And while that might make us all susceptible to advertising and the fabrications of dishonest politicians, the researchers have a more optimistic take. “These novel findings are in line with the assertion that processing fluency is not a judgmental bias and flaw in the individual, but rather a cue to truth that is universal and epistemologically justified in most contexts”, they write. In other words, it’s not that there’s a foolish subgroup of people who are more vulnerable to the “illusory truth” effect, but rather it’s an advantageous and universal bias that’s arisen because most of the time fluency actually is a reliable signal of truth. For example, a statement that is often repeated may tend to be endorsed by more people, which could be a useful cue to its truth.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t individual differences relating to the illusory truth effect waiting to be discovered, the team adds. Individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, for example, seem to show a less strong effect, suggesting that certain fundamental aspects of memory and cognition may be required to support the effect. With a greater willingness to publish null results like this one – and not just leave them in the file drawer – researchers should be able to build up a much more complete picture of the illusory truth effect and other cognitive biases.

—Investigating the robustness of the illusory truth effect across individual differences in cognitive ability, need for cognitive closure, and cognitive style [This study is a preprint meaning that it has not yet been subject to peer review and the final published version may differ from the version on which this report was based]

Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest

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Psychologists Have Identified The Creatures We Find Most Scary And Revolting

5 Reasons why online learning is the best way to study

The digital age is bringing about new and exciting opportunities in the area of education. Here are some of the advantages of online learning.

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A Key Brain Difference Between Voice-Hearing Patients And Voice-Hearing Healthy Controls Challenges The “Continuum Model”

Decades-Long Surveys Suggest The “Deleterious Effects of Smoking May Extend to Detrimental Personality Changes”

By Christian Jarrett

There is increasing recognition that while our personality traits are stable enough to shape our lives profoundly, they are also partly malleable, so that our choices and experiences can feedback and influence the kind of people we become. A new study in the Journal of Research in Personality shines a light on a highly consequential behaviour that captures this dynamic – smoking cigarettes.

The results add “… to existing knowledge on the implications of smoking by showing that this behaviour is also likely to alter individuals’ characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving over time,” the researchers said.

It’s already well established that, by virtue of their traits, some people are more disposed than others to take up smoking – namely those who are more extraverted, less emotionally stable and less conscientious. The new research, led by Yannick Stephan at the University of Montpellier, suggests (but does not prove) that this habit can then feedback and shape smokers’ traits.

Using repeated measures of people’s personality traits over many years, the researchers report that smokers display personality changes that are different from those seen in non-smokers, especially in terms of reduced emotional stability and reduced extraversion.

The data come from five large surveys of middle-aged and older volunteers, four in the US and one in Japan. Ranging in size from just over 600 participants to over 6000, the surveys included information on whether the participants smoked and measures of their personality traits collected repeatedly over time spans from 4 to 20 years.

Overall, the results showed that smokers showed declines in emotional stability, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness, relative to non-smokers. However, the precise patterns of change varied across the different samples. The most consistent pattern was for smokers to show relative declines in emotional stability and extraversion.

Stephan and his team also looked to see if stopping smoking had any positive personality consequences. In fact, there was little evidence of this. If anything, stopping smoking was associated with declines in agreeableness. Perhaps, the researchers speculated, this is because of a loss of “smoking-related social interactions”; residual adverse effects of smoking; and due to health-related side-effects associated with smoking cessation, such as “heightened risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes” both of which are known to have unhelpful consequences for personality traits.

The study is impressive for the size of the samples and the use of a longitudinal methodology that followed the same people over time. However, it’s limited by the reliance on participants’ self-reports of their own traits; the lack of information on smoking intensity; the skew towards older participants; and it’s inability to offer insights into why smoking would seem to lead to mostly adverse personality changes.

The researchers speculated that the health-related harms of smoking might be a factor mediating the habit’s apparent effects on personality. Health consequences of smoking such as insomnia, depression and reduced cardio-vascular fitness are known to have negative effects on personality. “Furthermore,” Stephan’s team add, “smoking may alter the energetic capacities needed to maintain emotional stability, the tendency to be exploratory, cooperative and altruistic, self-disciplined and playful, and enthusiastic and active.”

A curious detail in the findings is that, unlike the US samples, differences in personality change were not found among smokers in Japan compared with non-smokers. The researchers said this result may be an extension of what has become known as the “Japanese smoking paradox” – the fact that even though smoking rates are higher in Japan than the US, rates of lung cancer and mortality risk are lower.

Overall, this new research represents “the largest and longest longitudinal examination of the association between smoking and personality change in adulthood,” the researchers said. The results suggest that the “deleterious effects of smoking may extend to detrimental personality changes,” they added.

However, and as the researchers acknowledge, this conclusion, while highly plausible, comes with a hefty caveat – the observational study design cannot prove that smoking causes personality change. It’s possible that another factor or factors, such as stressful life circumstances, both increase the likelihood of people taking up smoking and cause unwelcome long-term personality changes. It’s also possible that pre-existing personality dispositions drive both the uptake of smoking and the later trajectory of personality change over time.

Future research that collects more detailed baseline contextual data on participants may be able to test these possibilities. In the meantime, if you are ever tempted to take up smoking, it is worth considering that it is not just your health you are putting at risk, but possibly also your personality.

—Cigarette Smoking and Personality Change Across Adulthood: Findings from Five Longitudinal Samples

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest and the author of a forthcoming book on personality change

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A Core Subgroup of Believers Don’t Just Think Learning Styles Are Real, But Also Inherited And Hard-Wired In The Brain

A low-cost counselling service opens in Woodstock

The Counselling Hub delivers affordable counselling services in an effort to address the inextricable link between poverty and mental illness.

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Reflecting On Their Various Social Identities Boosts Children’s Creativity And Flexible Thinking

By Christian Jarrett

It usually helps to “get a fresh pair of eyes” on a problem, especially from someone with a different perspective than your own. But what if you could find a variety of vantage points from within yourself? After all, each of us has multiple roles and identities in life. In a new paper in Developmental Science, a team led by Sarah Gaither at Duke University presents evidence that prompting children to think about their own multiple identities boosts their problem-solving skills and increases their flexible thinking.

“Someone can be a woman and White, a teacher and a parent, a girl and a friend,” the researchers write. “Although individuals may not automatically reflect on their multiple identities, here we propose that when they do, it may have positive consequences for their creative problem solving and flexible thinking.”

In the first of three studies, Gaither and her team split 48 six- and seven-year-olds into two groups. One was the intervention group and these participants spent time reflecting briefly with a researcher about eight of their various social identities, such as “friend”, “girl” and “reader”. This process concluded with the researcher saying “That is so cool that you are lots of things at the same time.” The other group served as a control and these participants chatted briefly with a researcher about eight of their different physical attributes, such as having two feet and a mouth. Similar to the intervention condition, the control condition ended with the researcher saying “That is so cool that you have a lot of things at the same time.”

Afterwards all the children completed four different problem solving and flexible thinking challenges. One test involved them figuring out how a bear with a bowl of lego could reach honey in a high branch on a tree* (they were told that even stacked together the lego couldn’t reach). Another test involved coming up with novel uses for a gold box. The third involved categorising a collection of photos of 16 individuals in as many ways as possible. The last task involved an interaction with a puppet who made 16 claims about different pairs of items or individuals belonging to the same category, such as a dog and cat being the same kind of animal, or a male and female child being the same kind of person. When the child agreed the puppet was correct, this was taken as a sign of flexible thinking.

The findings were consistent, with the children who reflected on their multiple identities outperforming the children in the control condition on all four of the tests. For instance, half the children in the multiple identities condition solved the bear puzzle, compared with just 12.5 per cent of the control condition children; and the children agreed with the puppets’ broad-minded thinking over six times, on average, compared with under four times on average among the controls.

In two follow-up studies with dozens more children, the researchers showed that reflecting on another person’s multiple identities, as opposed to one’s own, did not have the same benefit; and that some of the performance gains associated with thinking about one’s own multiple identities were greater when these were phrased in a way that made them sound a stable part of the self rather than a transient preference – reflecting on being a helper rather than enjoying helping, for instance.

Past research with adults had already shown benefits to creative thinking of reflecting on one’s own different social identities. This new research builds on those findings by extending them to children, and showing that the benefits are limited to reflecting on one’s own social identities, as opposed to one’s physical attributes, or reflecting on the social identities of others. The new results also jibe with past research showing that travelling abroad and visiting other cultures can increase open-mindedness and creativity. It’s possible that reflecting on one’s own varied social identities helps to activate memories of diverse experiences and perspectives, thus helping trigger more flexible thinking – however, more research is needed to identify the precise mechanisms at play.

The idea that a short, simple intervention could have such seemingly dramatic effects will likely raise the eyebrows of more sceptical readers. Successful replication attempts with larger samples and diverse participants may help alleviate these doubts. Future research could also look into whether the multiple identities intervention would have greater benefits for individuals with more diverse social roles and experiences (for children raised in multicultural or multi-racial homes, for instance), and whether reflecting on social roles that one perceives negatively would still be beneficial.

“Our discovery suggests that anyone–regardless of their racial group or other social identification–may benefit from a multifaceted mindset,” the researchers said. “Something as simple as thinking about one’s identity from multiple angles could increase open-mindedness in a society that is becoming increasingly diverse.”

—Thinking about multiple identities boosts children’s flexible thinking

*The answer is by emptying the bowl, inverting it and using it as a step to stand on and reach higher.

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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