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People will be taught to erase unpleasant memories
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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People can be taught to erase unpleasant memories, researchers at the University of St Andrews have found, in what experts are calling a breakthrough in treating emotional disorders.
Post-traumatic stress disorder develops in a person after experiencing shock. For example, a car accident, rape, participation in military operations, being taken hostage by terrorists, etc. PTSD is based on bad memories that haunt people for years and decades.
But scientists from Scotland have discovered that some people can be trained to forget personal feelings associated with unpleasant memories. That is, stressful events will not be erased from memory, but a person will forget their consequences and personal attitude to what happened. A kind of pictures from the lives of strangers will remain in the head, like fragments of a film.
The researchers asked volunteers to generate emotional memories in response to various keywords, such as theater, barbecue, wildlife, etc. Participants had to recall the cause of the event, its consequences, and the personal meaning they had derived from it. Afterwards, people were asked to come up with their own word that they would associate with the memory.
In the next part, the volunteers were given key words and words they had chosen themselves. The scientists asked them to either remember an event that was associated with this pair of words or not to think about associations. As a result, the study participants could remember the reason for the event, but easily forgot what exactly happened and how it affected them personally.
This technique, if improved, could be used by psychologists in their work with victims of post-traumatic stress disorder in the near future.
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