After applying to study psychology at A-level, the other applicants and I were given a 'Preliminary Assessment Task' to do which was simply a psychology research coursework for us to do over the summer.
At the time it was clear to me that the task had been made just to dissuade anyone who would have taken psychology because it had the reputation of 'an easy A-level,' since anyone of that attitude is unlikely to do coursework over an otherwise work-free summer. Regardless, I chose to treat it as though my entry into the A-level depended on its quality.
The task was to gather information and research on 'state dependent memory' and then design your own study method as if you were investigating it yourself. These are a few of the themes I came across:
Firstly, the idea of 'State-dependent memory' refers to an internal context, where the recalling of an event when we felt a certain way depends on the way we feel while we try to remember it. So memory of events is helped greatly by us feeling the same way at the point of recalling; for example if you want to recall an event when you were happy, it's suggested that it would be easier if you are feeling happy at the current time (McCormick & Mayer, 1991).
Another, more extreme example would be if a victim of a violent crime wished to remember details of the crime to aid police investigation, their memory would be more effective if they were in a similarly emotionally aroused state (Clark et al., 1987).
While I found this concept highly intriguing I couldn't help but be skeptical about the two examples above; personally, I'd say that when you are happy you tend to be more focused on the moment than the past (often, we tend to reflect more on past events when we are unhappy in our current situation), and focus is surely a big factor on the efficiency of our memory. Also, in the case of the victim's recall, if they were put under the amount of distress that a violent crime can provoke then it's quite probable that their recall ability would be fairly reduced. however, I feel that such a case could easily be evidenced either way - but investigating such a variable as extreme distress would have a lot of ethical difficulties involved.
The idea of our memory relying on emotion is not at all a new one; Freud's theory of motivated forgetting (1901) describes an unconscious cause of forgetting certain material. He believed that memories that are likely to cause a negative mood, such as anxiety or shame, are likely to be unconsciously repressed as a defense mechanism. This is most likely referring to very big events occurring in our past (mainly our childhood) that would require a long period of therapy to truly uncover - according to psycho-dynamic theory. So, like the ideas proposed above by Clark and McCormick & Mayer, this describes our internal emotions and bias to make certain memories inaccessible to us.
