Therapy and Treatment
Psych in Real Life: Reconsolidation
Learning Objectives
- Explain how conditioning aids in therapy techniques, particularly through memory reconsolidation
Problems with memory are at the core of many psychological disorders. For example, people suffering from both clinical-level depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often have difficulty remembering details of specific memories, especially for happy experiences. This is called overgeneralized autobiographical memory (OGM). A therapist might ask a depressed person showing OGM to recall a recent happy experience. The depressed person might answer, “When I was visiting my friends last weekend,” but then be unable to recall or describe any particular events or interactions during that visit that were enjoyable or rewarding. For another example, people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) experience less confidence in the accuracy of memories they retrieve than people without the disorder. This uncertainty about memory can lead to obsessive thoughts about whether they turned off the stove or paid the electric bill when it was due. People with OCD also tend to show a bias to retrieve threatening memories. Nearly every major psychological disorder you will study in this course has some aspect of memory that is either a symptom or a process that maintains the disorder or more often both.
You may also have learned by now that remembering and thinking about past events—either recent or long ago—is the basis of most forms of psychotherapy. The psychodynamic therapy developed by Sigmund Freud is almost entirely based on remembering actual experiences or recent dreams. Even newer forms of therapy, like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), involve a great deal of memory work.
It may seem that research laboratories in universities and medical centers are a long way from psychotherapists’ offices, but professional therapists keep up with new developments in basic research and they often collaborate with researchers in bridging the gap between new theories and the application of those theories in the real world. A great example of the basic research-applied research connection is the development of therapies that can change the emotional impact of some memories without erasing or otherwise distorting them.
Memory Consolidation
Until the early part of the 21st century, most people thought of memories—particularly memories of personal events, technically known as autobiographical memories—as mental representations that become relatively stable and unchangeable very quickly. We knew that memories do not stabilize immediately, however, because brain trauma (e.g., a concussion) or certain drugs could interfere with people’s ability to recall events immediately before the trauma or administration of the drug. The neural processes that occur between an experience and the stabilization of the memory for that experience is called consolidation. Consolidation is complex, wit