Articles on Memory

The Language of Emotions
This study was conducted by profesors Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stjin van Osselaer. It talks about how messages attarct more the attention of people if they are written in their native languages. This emotional trigger that is pulled with messages in their native language is due to their personal memories, or the language contaext in which this memories are related to the message. The message may have a word in it that incounsciously triggers a memories in which the word(s) had a significant meaning for them. People ususally have more memories related to their native languages then their foreign languages, and this is why a message in their own laguage will have a stronger effect. In terms of marketing it is advised that the messages sent through advertisement are in the peoples native languages. Companies who need to sell may use this study to get advice about their publicity.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215111433.htm

Some Short-Term Memories Die Suddenly
This study was conducted by Weiwei Zhang and Steve Luck. It basically proves that short-term memories dont fade away gradually, but the instantly disapear over a certain short period of time, usually seconds. these profesors gave out two test to twelve participants, one test was with squares, and different color fills, the person had to remember the colors of the square after some time. The second test was similar but it used colors.  “The memories are not like flashlights that get progressively weaker as the battery runs low, They are more like a laptop computer that continues working at the same speed until it suddenly shuts down.” Steve Luck. It will be important in life to avoid confusion when trying to make decisions based on weak, inaccurate memories.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429091806.htm

The Memories You Want to Forget are The Hardest to Lose
The author of this study is called Keith Payne, a professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Science and Elizabeth Corrigan a student. This study proved that the graphical negative images we see, are more permanent than reading negative words. They asked 218 participants to react to photographs instead of text. With this study they found out that people can not forget emotional events as esasily as unsignificant events, and that pleasant and unpleasant memories are hard to intentionally forget. Payne said that if there is enough powerful motivation to forget this memory it can be done. this willl help in the real life, to erase those traumatic memories that shape our personality.

The Placebo Effect

A Placebo is a know as a pharmacological inert substnce that produces and effect similar to what is expected from a pharacological active substance. Also know as fake surgeries and therapies. H.K. Beecher, a psychologist who studied these placebos, and their effects, wrote even a book called " The Powerful Placebo". he identified that a big percentage of the patients who submitted to placebo surgeries or treatments were satisfactorily relieved from their pains or defects. Although Beechers experiments had many faults. First he did not report all his findings, he only reported the improvements on patients with placebo treatments, but did not report when the patiants deteriorated. He did not report that forty percent of the time that placebos were applied, the patient deteriorated. Later a research group discovered that the placebos used in various experiemtns was no effective at all. They compared two grouos, one that was given placebos, and other that was not given medicine at all, and found out that both groups had the exact same results. I think that placebos may be effective some times but not always, it can depend on the patient. If the patient truly believes he can be healed with this treatment, it may actually work. if a patient has a negative view of his treatment, and believes he has no cure, no placebo will work, and real treatments will still take time to cure them. 

Eye-Witness Reports

Loftus and Palmer (1974)

In this study Loftus and Palmer are attempting to demonstrate that memory is not a factual recording of an event and that memories can become distorted by other information which occurs after the event.
Many of the early studies of memory demonstrated how memories are not accurate records of our experiences. It seems that we try to fit past events into our existing representations of the world, making the memory more coherent or make more sense for us.
Much research has documented how difficult it is for people to estimate numerical details such as time, speed and distance. Judgement of speed is especially difficult, with witnesses of traffic accidents varying in their estimations as to how fast a vehicle was actually travelling.
Elizabeth Loftus is a leading figure in the field of eyewitness testimony research. She has demonstrated through the use of leading questions how it is possible to distort a person’s memory of an event.
The study actually consists of two laboratory experiments. The independent variable in both of the experiments is the verb used. The dependent variable in the first experiment is the participant’s speed estimate and the dependent variable in the second experiment is whether the participant believed they saw glass.