[thedoc (OP)]

People with better memories may also be more likely to form false memories.

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[PRice]

People don’t re-experience an emotional memory when they just recall it. And it’s yet another level further removed from an emotional memory when someone describes their recall of it.

To illustrate these differences with an example, I burned my left index fingertip last week being careless while toasting bread on an infrared oven grill. It wasn’t severe pain, and my fingertip has healed.

The pain is still stored with my emotional memory, and is probably why my memory is very clear. I recall the visual details of the grill, how my fingertip looked, the pain I initially felt, and the relief I felt when I held my finger under running cold water.

The researchers introduced factors to try to confuse the subjects about their recall of their emotions, and their verbal descriptions of their recall. The researchers were very sure that confusing the subjects’ thinking-brain recalls and descriptions produced evidence that the subjects’ emotional memories were changed and falsified.

Can you see how far removed the researchers were from studying emotional memories? They didn’t demonstrate that they understood where emotional memories were stored because they didn’t attempt to engage the subjects’ feeling brain areas.

Let’s imagine that the researchers analogously studied my burned fingertip. They would deny that I can accurately retrieve and re-experience my emotional memory of my accident if I initially say that I pushed the kitchen faucet handle all the way in the cold direction, then after repeated questioning, I say that I wasn’t sure that the handle was pushed all the way over to Cold.

The problem the researchers’ viewpoint created with this study was that they were determined to produce a finding that emotional memories could be falsified. To this end, the study defined the subjects’ recalls of post-9/11 emotions and descriptions of their recalls as emotional memories.

The researchers’ strawman definition of emotional memories was simply wrong. Maybe their purposeful error could be overlooked if it was confined to this study.

But it isn’t. You can imagine the damage this viewpoint creates when mental health professionals adopt it, and deny their patients’ feelings, experiences, and emotional memories.

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