The Self Midterm

• Identity: I exist now, in the moment, and this "I" will exist in the future
• Strict identity is numerical; X and Y are the same if they have all the same properties
• Klein believes that we live in the synchronic self
• The Povinelli asked what age children will reach up and take the post-it off their heads, demonstrating a dyachronic sense of self
• From the Povinelli study, it seems diachronic self emerges at the age of 4
• D.B could travel into known, public time, but he lacked personal time travel. When testing this, they ensured that both intervals (past & future) were of equal lengths
• The timespan of STM is under a minute
• The definition of STM lacks parsimony due to the various capacities of it (what are chunks?)
• There are dissociations, but between STM and LTM there are no what?

  No double associations
• Tulving's definition of episodic memory involves time, space, and self
• Dissociations aren't evidence of both kinds of things falling under one category, they just prove that these things are different from one another
• In academic psychology, emotionality was previously removed
• Brown & Kulik studied personal salience and were interested in anecdotes
• Brown & Kulik examined people's recollection of the JFK assassination and found that compared to a control that lacked emotionality, people had highly detailed memories
• The flashbulb nature of a memory depends on how emotional the event was, and also how salient it is. For example, the MLK's assassination was more salient (flashbulb-like) for African Americans compared to white Americans
• A highly emotional event can create a flashbulb memory, but it can also lead to bad memory
• Freud theorized that in order to resolve our Oedipus complex, we banish it from conscious awareness (AKA memory). This is repression
• You can't think about a repressed memory because it has been maneuvered out of your conscious awareness, to a subconscious "part" of the brain
• Repressed memories cannot be falsified because it is possible that they never existed in the first place
• Just because you can't experiment, it doesn't mean that the phenomena don't exist. It is possible that you cannot know whether something is real or not
• With the cases of kids pulling repressed memories out in the 80s and 90s, it seems that some were "put" into their heads
• Unlike repression, suppression is falsifiable
• Suppression involves banishing ideas from conscious awareness intentionally, requiring effort
• The whole process of making something unavailable to your conscious awareness is ironic because you must think of it in order to be conscious of you not having thought of it
• In the first Wegner suppression study, there were two phases of the experiment: baseline and free expression
• The expression group in the first Wegner study was free to think about whatever they wanted in their mind in the baseline/trial 1 phase, while the suppression group was told not to think about a white bear, and to tap a bell every time they did.
• White bear was chosen as the object of suppression in the Wegner studies because it has no clear emotional valence
• In the free expression/trial 2 phase, 5 minutes after the first phase, everyone is free to think about whatever, think about white bear "as much as you want." The participants in the suppression group experienced a massive rebound effect in that the number of mentions of white bear skyrocketed and they couldn't stop thinking of white bear
• The dependent variable (DV) in the white bear/Wegner study was number of mentions of "white" bear, while the independent variable (IV) was the suppression group and expression group
• In the baseline/trial 1 phase of the Wegner experiment, the expression group thought about white bear more than the suppression group
• According to Freud, if you repress something, it is forever stuck in the unconscious
• William James conceptualized the self as knower and the self as known. the known are objects of consciousness. the knower is the ontological, the one experiencing
• 3 types of things that are known according to James' conceptualization of the self: 1) material, spiritual, social
• It is thought that the rebound effect occurs because associations are created and used as cues. The distractors you look to are your cues.
• Wegner tested the why of suppression by changing slideshows AKA the physical context of participants
• When Wegner was testing suppression, there was a massive rebound in the suppression group when they switched the slides back to the kitchen slides (setting wherein they were told to suppress, so they formed associations)
• One of the attributes of rehab is thought to be the fact that the setting is changed, so you no longer have associations/cues from your environment
• Fugue states typically don't last long and are from psychological trauma
• Fugue states involve temporarily forgetting who you are, creating a new identity. When you return to normal, you don't remember anything from the fugue state.
• In fugue states, knowledge of traits are virtually the same