Survey Finds Depression Pervasive in College
Published On Monday, March 31, 2003 12:00 AM
By EBONIE D. HAZLE
Crimson Staff Writer
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Nearly half of the Harvard College student body felt depressed during the last academic year and almost 10 percent of undergraduates reported that they had considered suicide, according to the results of a survey released by University Health Services (UHS) earlier this month.
The survey results reveal a startling number of undergraduates battling depression at Harvard and cite stress and lack of sleep as the leading factors affecting students’ academic performances.
And, more alarming to College administrators, most students are not reaching out for help.
“The biggest problem the University faces is finding ways to reduce the stigma of depression so people will come in for care,” UHS Director of Mental Health Services Richard D. Kadison wrote in an e-mail.
According to the results, less than half of those students diagnosed with depression are currently in therapy, though the figure is up from the 32.4 percent who said two years ago they were seeking counseling.
The survey, completed by roughly 14 percent of undergraduates enrolled during the 2001-2002 academic year, also found a high number of incidents of sexual assault on campus. Nearly 10 percent of Harvard undergraduates were involved in sexual touching against their will during the last year, according to the survey results, and about one percent of students reported involuntary sexual penetration.
UHS randomly sampled 2,500 of the 6,650 of the Harvard undergraduates enrolled during the 2001-2002 academic year, and 930 surveys were returned, for a roughly 37.2 percent response rate.
The health survey was only the second attempt to track Harvard students’ health behavior and attitudes since an initiative in 2000 where UHS partnered with the American College Health Association to investigate the health of students at Harvard and to compare those findings to national statistics. Prior to that joint effort, there was virtually no data about adolescent health available that was specific to college students.
College of the ‘Overwhelmed’
The UHS survey results reflect a stressed student body.
According to the results, 47.4 percent of students at the College reported feeling depressed at least once during the past academic year, and about a third say they’ve felt overwhelmed 11 or more times—the highest category choice.
Almost ten percent of students said that they had been clinically diagnosed with depression, and more than half of those students said that diagnosis came within the last year. In 2000, only a third of students who said they were clinically depressed said they had been diagnosed in the past year.
And 1.1 percent of those surveyed—roughly nine students—reported that they had attempted suicide in the last year.
Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 said that he thinks the demanding work ethic and the high stress level of some students may be partly to blame for Harvard students’ poor mental health.
“Certainly I am not surprised by the generally high levels of reported stress and depression…I do think that students expect too much of themselves and sometimes take too much on,” he wrote in an email.
The survey statistics support Lewis’ hypothesis.
Thirty-three percent of students reported feeling exhausted—for reasons other than physical activity—11 or more times in the past school year.
A significant portion of students are also not getting the exercise they need; twenty-two percent of those surveyed reported no vigorous or moderate exercise in the previous week.
And when asked whether any of 24 factors had affected their academic performance within the last school year, stress and sleep issues made up more than half of undergraduates’ citations.
Despite concerns that students are not seeking help, UHS has seen an overall increase in the number of students receiving treatment for depression and other mental health problems over the past three years.
“We’ve had a significant increase in our staffing to meet the demand, but the demand has grown as quickly as the new staffing, which I see as a good sign,” Kadison wrote.
Kadison said that he thinks that the increased presence of peer counseling groups is one reason for the increase.
“Students are more likely to listen to their peers and these groups are helping students to get information and learn about resources,” he wrote.
Rise in Sexual Assault
There was a statistically significant rise in reported incidents of sexual assault on campus last year. The percentage of students who were involved in sexual touching against their will increased to 9.7 percent last year, up from the 7.6 percent who reported being victims of such acts in 2000.
Moreover, 0.9 percent—1.3 of female respondents and 0.3 percent of male respondents—reported actual sexual penetration against their will. Though lower than the national average, which was 1.8 percent in 2000, that figure still means that at least nine out of the 930 students on campus who completed this survey said they had been raped over the course of the previous year.
Students’ perceived access to information about sexual assault has increased markedly in the last two years. In the most recent survey, 82 percent reported receiving information on sexual assault and rape, more than any other health-related topic and a ten percent increase from 2000.
These statistics come nearly a year after the Faculty’s controversial vote to require corroborating evidence before the College’s Administrative Board investigates peer-to-peer disputes—including claims of sexual assault.
The backlash to that policy change led to the formation of a committee to review and make recommendations on Harvard’s support services for victims of sexual violence and on preventive, educational and outreach programs to reduce the incidence of sexual violence in the College.
That committee was the third in a one-year span formed to examine the way that Harvard deals with sexual assault.
Everybody’s Doing It
Questions about students’ sexual habits revealed that Harvard students are less sexually active than their peers at other institutions, though that is definitely not the perception of students on campus.
According to the survey, 49.3 percent Harvard students have never had vaginal sex. But Harvard undergraduates have a much higher estimate of the amount of sex their fellow students are having.
For example, 61.4 percent of Harvard students said they believed the typical Harvard student had had vaginal sex with 2 or more partners over the course of the last year. But only 22.8 percent of students reported having vaginal sex with
that number of partners. In fact, 41.8 percent of the survey respondents said that they had not had vaginal sex with any partner during the previous year.
But those Harvard students who are engaging in sexual activity are much more likely to use some form of contraception than the typical American college student. Roughly 60 percent of those students who had engaged in vaginal intercourse reported mostly or always using a condom. That’s up three percent from 2000 and significantly higher than the national average, which in recent years has been about 45 percent.
Kadison, however, says that level of contraception use is still below where it should be.
Another interesting finding of the survey is that Harvard students are roughly twice as likely as their peers to use emergency contraception. Use of the morning after pill up to 14.2 percent this year from 13 percent in 2000. The national average in 2000 was just 6.7 percent.
Other Interesting Findings
The survey had several other important findings not directly related to sexual health.
For instance, 40.4 percent (23 percent men and 54 percent of women) reported that they were actively trying to lose weight.
UHS has also seen an increase in students seeking treatment for acute alcohol intoxication. “There have been at least two incidents that might have led to the death of a student if they hadn’t been brought in when they were,” Kadison wrote. Furthermore, 9.8 percent of students reported having unprotected sex as a result of drinking, which was a large jump from the 7 percent who reported such actions in the 2000 survey.
—Staff writer Ebonie D. Hazle can be reached at hazle@fas.harvard.edu.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=347255
Showing posts with label Harvard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harvard. Show all posts
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Harvardian Lifestyle Surveyed, Compared
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HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES
Study finds Harvard students healthier than peers
By William J. Cromie
Gazette Staff
Students at Harvard drink more, smoke less, and have less sex than students at other colleges, according to the first nationwide survey of college lifestyles and health behaviors. Harvardians also are more depressed, get into fewer fights, and are slightly more likely to be homosexual or bisexual.
The American College Health Association did the survey by sending questionnaires to 28 schools last year; 16,024 undergraduate students responded including 904 from Harvard.
"We were pleased to see that we are no worse and slightly better than other schools," said David Rosenthal, director of Harvard's University Health Services (UHS).
Slightly more than 75 percent of Harvard students described their health as excellent or very good, compared with 61 percent of the national sample.
"Smoking is a problem," admitted Rosenthal. Although only 15.6 percent of Harvard students said they smoke, compared with 25.3 percent nationally, "I was surprised at the large number of our students who smoke," he said.
"We see smoking increasing as students move from their freshman to their senior year," noted Michael Hoyt, coordinator of health resources at UHS. "This is a huge issue because students are at the age where they're starting to form lifetime habits."
"Alcohol is also a big issue," Rosenthal said. Slightly more than 72 percent of Harvard students reported drinking alcohol in the 30 days before completing the questionnaire, compared with the national average of 68 percent.
"The thing that keeps me up at night is concern about students injuring themselves or others after drinking too much," Rosenthal noted.
About 8 percent of Harvard students reported driving after drinking. Fourteen percent admitted injuring themselves as a consequence of drinking, compared with 17 percent nationally. Two percent said they injured another person, compared with more than 4 percent nationally. At Harvard, 30 percent of the drinkers forgot where they were or what they did at times; the national average was 28 percent.
Alcohol use affected the academic performance of 5.5 percent of students at Harvard, versus 7.9 percent nationally, according to the survey.
Drinking and sex
Drinking that leads to unwanted sex is a problem on every campus. One percent of Harvard's female undergraduates reported use of force or threats of force to have sex, less than half the 2.3 percent national average.
At Harvard, 0.8 percent of the women reported they were raped, compared with 1.8 percent nationally. "The 0.8 percent amounts to 52 students," Hoyt pointed out. He noted that less than a half-dozen rapes were actually reported. "That is the kind of information we need in our efforts to get the number down to zero."
Thirty-nine percent of Harvard males and females said they had no sex partners within the past school year, compared with 29 percent of males and 27 percent of females nationally. Five percent of Harvard men and women reported having four or more partners in the past school year, compared with national numbers of 11 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
At Harvard, 2.6 percent of students describe themselves as gay or lesbian versus 1.4 percent nationally. For bisexuality, the numbers are 2.2 versus 1.5 percent. Some students said they were "not sure" of their sexual orientation - 1.7 percent at Harvard, 1.5 percent nationally.
Living away from home and meeting academic standards can be stressful for many students. Nationally, 23 percent reported they have been diagnosed with depression within the past year, as opposed to 34 percent at Harvard. Approximately 34 percent of the Harvardians are in therapy or taking medication for depression, versus about 19 percent nationally.
Rosenthal attributed the higher numbers of those in treatment to a Harvard outreach program begun last year. "We have the students watching out for each other," he noted. "The faculty - even dining-service workers - are alert for signs of depression. And we have increased the number and hours of availability of mental health professionals."
Rosenthal also expressed concern about diet and physical activity on campus. More than a quarter of Harvard students (29 percent of the males, 21 percent of the females) said they are overweight. Two percent checked "very overweight" on the questionnaire. Forty-two percent of Harvard students, and 50 percent of students nationally are exercising to lose weight; for dieting the numbers are 23 and 26 percent.
Harvard has been working to improve all its numbers, said Hoyt and Rosenthal. "Surveys like this one provide us with information we need to spot trends and to evaluate the health services we provide," Hoyt noted.
"Our numbers are good," added Rosenthal, "but we still have a great deal to do."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
HOME : Science Prev issues | Contact us | Harvard News Office
Current Issue:
October 04, 2001
News
News, events, features
Science/Research
Latest scientific findings
Profiles
The people behind the university
Community
Harvard and neighbor communities
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On Campus
Newsmakers, notes, students, police log
Arts
Museums, concerts, theater
Calendar
Two-week listing of upcoming events
HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES
Study finds Harvard students healthier than peers
By William J. Cromie
Gazette Staff
Students at Harvard drink more, smoke less, and have less sex than students at other colleges, according to the first nationwide survey of college lifestyles and health behaviors. Harvardians also are more depressed, get into fewer fights, and are slightly more likely to be homosexual or bisexual.
The American College Health Association did the survey by sending questionnaires to 28 schools last year; 16,024 undergraduate students responded including 904 from Harvard.
"We were pleased to see that we are no worse and slightly better than other schools," said David Rosenthal, director of Harvard's University Health Services (UHS).
Slightly more than 75 percent of Harvard students described their health as excellent or very good, compared with 61 percent of the national sample.
"Smoking is a problem," admitted Rosenthal. Although only 15.6 percent of Harvard students said they smoke, compared with 25.3 percent nationally, "I was surprised at the large number of our students who smoke," he said.
"We see smoking increasing as students move from their freshman to their senior year," noted Michael Hoyt, coordinator of health resources at UHS. "This is a huge issue because students are at the age where they're starting to form lifetime habits."
"Alcohol is also a big issue," Rosenthal said. Slightly more than 72 percent of Harvard students reported drinking alcohol in the 30 days before completing the questionnaire, compared with the national average of 68 percent.
"The thing that keeps me up at night is concern about students injuring themselves or others after drinking too much," Rosenthal noted.
About 8 percent of Harvard students reported driving after drinking. Fourteen percent admitted injuring themselves as a consequence of drinking, compared with 17 percent nationally. Two percent said they injured another person, compared with more than 4 percent nationally. At Harvard, 30 percent of the drinkers forgot where they were or what they did at times; the national average was 28 percent.
Alcohol use affected the academic performance of 5.5 percent of students at Harvard, versus 7.9 percent nationally, according to the survey.
Drinking and sex
Drinking that leads to unwanted sex is a problem on every campus. One percent of Harvard's female undergraduates reported use of force or threats of force to have sex, less than half the 2.3 percent national average.
At Harvard, 0.8 percent of the women reported they were raped, compared with 1.8 percent nationally. "The 0.8 percent amounts to 52 students," Hoyt pointed out. He noted that less than a half-dozen rapes were actually reported. "That is the kind of information we need in our efforts to get the number down to zero."
Thirty-nine percent of Harvard males and females said they had no sex partners within the past school year, compared with 29 percent of males and 27 percent of females nationally. Five percent of Harvard men and women reported having four or more partners in the past school year, compared with national numbers of 11 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
At Harvard, 2.6 percent of students describe themselves as gay or lesbian versus 1.4 percent nationally. For bisexuality, the numbers are 2.2 versus 1.5 percent. Some students said they were "not sure" of their sexual orientation - 1.7 percent at Harvard, 1.5 percent nationally.
Living away from home and meeting academic standards can be stressful for many students. Nationally, 23 percent reported they have been diagnosed with depression within the past year, as opposed to 34 percent at Harvard. Approximately 34 percent of the Harvardians are in therapy or taking medication for depression, versus about 19 percent nationally.
Rosenthal attributed the higher numbers of those in treatment to a Harvard outreach program begun last year. "We have the students watching out for each other," he noted. "The faculty - even dining-service workers - are alert for signs of depression. And we have increased the number and hours of availability of mental health professionals."
Rosenthal also expressed concern about diet and physical activity on campus. More than a quarter of Harvard students (29 percent of the males, 21 percent of the females) said they are overweight. Two percent checked "very overweight" on the questionnaire. Forty-two percent of Harvard students, and 50 percent of students nationally are exercising to lose weight; for dieting the numbers are 23 and 26 percent.
Harvard has been working to improve all its numbers, said Hoyt and Rosenthal. "Surveys like this one provide us with information we need to spot trends and to evaluate the health services we provide," Hoyt noted.
"Our numbers are good," added Rosenthal, "but we still have a great deal to do."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Forgetting What's Normal--Forgetting
Forgetting: What’s normal?
(This article was first printed in the Harvard Health Publications Special Health Report “Improving Memory: Understanding and Preventing Age-Related Memory Loss”. For more information or to order, please go to http://health.harvard.edu/IM.)
It’s normal to forget some things, and it’s normal to become somewhat more forgetful as you age, but it’s not normal to forget too much. The question is, how much is too much? Regardless of age, some people’s memories are better than others — just as some people are better at math or more physically coordinated. How can you tell whether your memory lapses are within the scope of normal aging or are a symptom of something more serious?
Neuroscientists and physicians have not fully answered that question, but they have identified some key differences between normal memory lapses and those that occur with more serious cognitive deficits, such as dementia.
Seven types of normal memory problems
Regardless of age, healthy people can experience memory loss or memory distortion. In a book, Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, describes seven common “sins” of memory, discussed below. Some of these memory flaws become more pronounced with age, but — unless they are extreme and persistent — they are not considered indicators of Alzheimer’s or other memory-impairing illnesses.
Transience
This is the tendency to forget facts or events over time. You are most likely to forget information soon after you learn it; as time passes, the likelihood of forgetting decreases. However, memory has a use-it-or-lose-it quality: Memories that are called up and used frequently are least likely to be forgotten. Although transience might seem like a sign of memory weakness, brain scientists regard it as beneficial because it clears the brain of unused memories, making way for newer, more useful ones. In this sense, transience is akin to cleaning the junk out of your closets or clearing the temporary files from your computer’s hard drive.
Although everyone experiences transience of memory, it is extreme and debilitating in people with particular kinds of brain damage. For instance, people with amnesia from damage to the hippocampus and related structures have normal short-term memory, but they are unable to form new long-term memories (see “Amnesia”). They forget information soon after they learn it.
Absentmindedness
This type of forgetting occurs when you don’t pay close enough attention. You forget where you just put your pen because you didn’t focus on where you put it in the first place. You were thinking of something else (or, perhaps, nothing in particular), so your brain didn’t encode the information securely. Absentmindedness also involves forgetting to do something at a prescribed time, like taking your medicine or keeping an appointment. In this case, the problem is that you didn’t focus on things that can serve as cues to remind you to do something — like putting your vitamin pills at your place at the table so you’ll remember to take one when you eat breakfast.
For example, if the doctor told you to take your medicine at bedtime and you forgot to do so, it could be that you didn’t pay close enough attention to the key word: bedtime. If you had, chances are that certain details of your bedtime routine (like brushing your teeth or watching a particular show on TV) would have served as cues to remind you to take your medicine.
Blocking
Someone asks you a question and the answer is right on the tip of your tongue — you know that you know it, but you just can’t think of it. This tip-of-the-tongue experience is perhaps the most familiar example of blocking, the temporary inability to retrieve a memory. Blocking doesn’t occur because you weren’t paying attention or because the memory you’re looking for has faded from your brain. On the contrary, blocking occurs when a memory is properly stored in your brain, but something is keeping you from finding it.
In many cases, the memory block is a memory similar to the one you’re looking for but one that you retrieve instead. This other memory is so intrusive that you can’t think of the memory you want. A common example is if you call your older daughter by your younger daughter’s name, or vice versa. Scientists call blocking memories “ugly stepsisters” because they’re domineering, like the stepsisters in Cinderella. Scientists have used ugly stepsisters experimentally to block memories. In one such experiment, people were asked to pick out the definitions of uncommon words from a selection of possible definitions. When definitions that were similar in sound or in meaning were given along with the accurate definition, more people had memory blocks than when unrelated ones were given.
Brain-imaging studies suggest how blocking might work in the brain. When a person is retrieving a memory, some regions of the brain become more active and others become less active. Scientists interpret this finding to mean that the active regions actually inhibit the other regions. When the right regions are activated, the inhibition of other regions can work in your favor by keeping your brain from calling up irrelevant information. But when you call up an ugly stepsister by mistake, the brain regions that encode it may suppress the regions needed to retrieve the memory you really want.
Scientists think that memory blocks become more common with age and that they account for the trouble older people have remembering other people’s names. But it remains unclear whether tip-of-the-tongue experiences are more common than other age-related memory problems. Nor have researchers determined whether memory blocks are simply caused by the overall slowing of memory retrieval that occurs with age. In any case, there’s encouraging news about blocking. Research shows that people are able to retrieve about half of the blocked memories within just a minute.
Misattribution
Consider the following scenario: You’re asked who “John Smith” is, and you remember quite clearly not only who he is, but also what he’s done lately that’s been in the news. Then you’re asked where you learned these details. You think for a moment and reply that it was on the evening TV news. However, there was no report about John Smith on TV. Instead, you got your information from the friend you had lunch with yesterday.
Right memory, wrong source — that’s one example of misattribution. Misattribution occurs when you remember something accurately in part, but misattribute some detail, like the time, place, or person involved. Another kind of misattribution occurs when you believe a thought you had was totally original when, in fact, it came from something you had previously read or heard but had forgotten about. This sort of misattribution explains cases of unintentional plagiarism, in which a writer passes off some information as original when he or she actually read it somewhere before.
Misattribution happens to everyone. Usually it’s harmless, but it can have profound consequences, particularly in the criminal justice system. In some cases, misattribution on the part of eyewitnesses is responsible for the arrest and conviction of individuals for crimes they didn’t commit.
The older the memory, the more likely it is to suffer misattribution. One study documented how misattribution crept into people’s recollections of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Immediately after the Challenger tragedy, researchers at Emory University asked students to write down what they were doing when they heard the news. A year later, the researchers asked the same students to write down their memories of the event again. These later descriptions were riddled with misattributions. But misattributions can be startlingly strong. When told of the discrepancies, the students had trouble believing that their memories were inaccurate. Indeed, three years later, when the students were once again asked to recall the Challenger explosion, their recollections were closer to their second accounts.
As with several other kinds of memory lapses, misattribution becomes more common with age. Age matters in at least two ways. First, as you age, you absorb fewer details when acquiring information because you have somewhat more trouble concentrating. Second, as you grow older, your memories grow older as well. And old memories are especially prone to misattribution.
Suggestibility
Imagine that you saw someone fleeing from a car as its antitheft alarm was blaring. You didn’t get a good look at the thief, but another person on the street insisted that it was a man wearing a green plaid jacket. Later, when the police show you photos of possible suspects, you’re confused until you see a man dressed in green plaid. Then you point to him.
Suggestibility refers to false memories that you develop because someone or something gives you some key information at the same time that you’re trying to retrieve a memory. Although little is known about exactly how suggestibility occurs in the brain, the suggestion fools your mind into thinking it’s a real memory. Suggestibility is the culprit in memories that adults have of incidents from their childhood that never really happened (see “Are recovered memories real?”).
In several studies, people have been induced to recall false events from their childhood after a researcher planted ideas in their minds. In one study, college students’ parents were asked to complete a questionnaire that asked whether certain events happened to the students. Then the students themselves were asked whether they recalled several events — some of which had actually happened (according to the parents’ responses) and some of which hadn’t. At first, 80%–90% of the students accurately recalled the events that had and hadn’t happened to them. But in later interviews, if a researcher suggested that a false event had actually happened to them when they were children, 20%–40% of the students described some memory of it.
No one knows whether people become more vulnerable to suggestibility as they age, but studies have demonstrated that many children experience it when asked to recollect alleged incidents of sexual abuse. Several studies with preschoolers indicate that suggestive questioning by the police or other adults can lead children to assert that certain events occurred when in fact they didn’t.
Bias
One of the biggest myths about memory is that it works like a camera, recording what you learn with complete accuracy. But even the sharpest memory isn’t a flawless snapshot of reality. In your memory, reality is filtered by your personal biases — experiences, beliefs, prior knowledge, and even your mood at the moment. Your biases affect your memories when they’re being encoded in your brain. And your mood and other biases at the moment when you retrieve a memory can influence what information you actually call up.
Bias can affect all sorts of memories, but among the most interesting examples are people’s recollections of their romantic relationships. In one study, couples who were dating were asked to evaluate themselves, their partners, and their relationships initially and then two months later. During the second session, participants were asked to recall what they had said initially. The people whose feelings for their partners and their relationships had become more negative recalled their initial evaluations as more negative than they really were. On the other hand, people whose feelings for their partners and their relationships had become more loving recalled their initial evaluations as more positive than they really were. Although everyone’s attitudes and preconceived notions bias their memories, there’s been virtually no research on the brain mechanisms behind memory bias or whether they become more common with age.
Persistence
Most people worry about forgetting things. But in some cases people wish they could forget, but can’t. The persistence of memories about traumatic events, negative feelings, and chronic fears is another form of memory problem. Some of these memories accurately reflect horrifying events, while others may be negative distortions of reality.
Two groups of people are especially prone to having persistent, upsetting memories. One group is individuals with depression. Research has shown that depressed people are given to ruminating over unpleasant events in their lives or mistakes that they believe they have made. Dwelling on such negatives also fuels a vicious cycle of increasing depression. The other group with persistent, unwanted memories includes people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a condition that can result from many different sorts of traumatic events — for example, sexual abuse or wartime experiences. Flashbacks, which are persistent, intrusive memories of the traumatic event, are a core feature of PTSD.
Research has shown that persistent memories depend on the activation of those parts of the brain that respond to fear, anxiety, and emotionally charged information. Brain-imaging studies have shown that when people with PTSD recall a persistent, intrusive memory, there is activity in the amygdala as well as in other regions associated with the experience of fear and anxiety. Many people learn to control persistent memories through therapy that involves guided imagery, or visualization. With this technique, a therapist helps the patient learn gradually to envision the traumatic incident without intense fear, eventually lessening PTSD symptoms.
Are recovered memories real?
Recovered memories are vivid, emotionally powerful recollections of events or occurrences from the distant past that a person has not thought of in years. The use of such memories — in particular, as evidence of past child abuse, incest, or other traumatic events — has engendered considerable controversy.
Critics of recovered-memory therapy point out that memory is not a literal register of experience. What we remember — and how we remember it — is influenced by our personalities, as well as our beliefs, hopes, and needs. New experiences interfere with old memories and cause them to distort or decay, and we may fill in the gaps, merge the memories of several events, or confuse what we had imagined or heard about with what we actually witnessed or experienced. Critics charge that recovered memories often reflect the power of suggestion during psychotherapy sessions and that the therapist, an authority figure, plays the key role in encouraging such false memories to emerge. Similarly, when the memory of distant events is a vital aspect of a criminal investigation, police, social workers, and other officials can intentionally or unintentionally influence what a person remembers.
Champions of recovered memory, on the other hand, insist that the more unusual and disturbing the memory, the less likely it is to be false. If anything, they say, people tend to doubt recovered memories of child abuse longer than they should. Advocates say that most recovered memories are spontaneous and are not generated as the result of a therapist’s intervention, although they may be revealed in that context because the therapist creates a safe environment in which to disclose them.
Both sides in this dispute have tried to support their positions with evidence from neurology and cognitive neuroscience, including animal experiments, brain scans, neuropsychological tests, and the examination of brain-damaged patients. But the majority of mental health professionals take a position between the two extremes.
Although there is no established consensus, the following advice may be useful. There are many degrees and several kinds of forgetting. Memories can contain varying elements of truth, partial truth, or distortion, and different individuals have different capacities for remembering and forgetting. A true memory (recovered or persistent) cannot be distinguished from a false one on the basis of internal evidence alone. Instead, people must tolerate some uncertainty. More research is needed on the prevalence of false memories and delayed recall. Eventually, as research clarifies the subtle nuances of how normal memory works, scientists may gain a better understanding of the interplay between knowledge and emotion in the recollection of traumatic experiences and may reach a consensus on the usefulness and reliability of recovered memories.
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Forgetting_Whats_normal.htm
(This article was first printed in the Harvard Health Publications Special Health Report “Improving Memory: Understanding and Preventing Age-Related Memory Loss”. For more information or to order, please go to http://health.harvard.edu/IM.)
It’s normal to forget some things, and it’s normal to become somewhat more forgetful as you age, but it’s not normal to forget too much. The question is, how much is too much? Regardless of age, some people’s memories are better than others — just as some people are better at math or more physically coordinated. How can you tell whether your memory lapses are within the scope of normal aging or are a symptom of something more serious?
Neuroscientists and physicians have not fully answered that question, but they have identified some key differences between normal memory lapses and those that occur with more serious cognitive deficits, such as dementia.
Seven types of normal memory problems
Regardless of age, healthy people can experience memory loss or memory distortion. In a book, Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, describes seven common “sins” of memory, discussed below. Some of these memory flaws become more pronounced with age, but — unless they are extreme and persistent — they are not considered indicators of Alzheimer’s or other memory-impairing illnesses.
Transience
This is the tendency to forget facts or events over time. You are most likely to forget information soon after you learn it; as time passes, the likelihood of forgetting decreases. However, memory has a use-it-or-lose-it quality: Memories that are called up and used frequently are least likely to be forgotten. Although transience might seem like a sign of memory weakness, brain scientists regard it as beneficial because it clears the brain of unused memories, making way for newer, more useful ones. In this sense, transience is akin to cleaning the junk out of your closets or clearing the temporary files from your computer’s hard drive.
Although everyone experiences transience of memory, it is extreme and debilitating in people with particular kinds of brain damage. For instance, people with amnesia from damage to the hippocampus and related structures have normal short-term memory, but they are unable to form new long-term memories (see “Amnesia”). They forget information soon after they learn it.
Absentmindedness
This type of forgetting occurs when you don’t pay close enough attention. You forget where you just put your pen because you didn’t focus on where you put it in the first place. You were thinking of something else (or, perhaps, nothing in particular), so your brain didn’t encode the information securely. Absentmindedness also involves forgetting to do something at a prescribed time, like taking your medicine or keeping an appointment. In this case, the problem is that you didn’t focus on things that can serve as cues to remind you to do something — like putting your vitamin pills at your place at the table so you’ll remember to take one when you eat breakfast.
For example, if the doctor told you to take your medicine at bedtime and you forgot to do so, it could be that you didn’t pay close enough attention to the key word: bedtime. If you had, chances are that certain details of your bedtime routine (like brushing your teeth or watching a particular show on TV) would have served as cues to remind you to take your medicine.
Blocking
Someone asks you a question and the answer is right on the tip of your tongue — you know that you know it, but you just can’t think of it. This tip-of-the-tongue experience is perhaps the most familiar example of blocking, the temporary inability to retrieve a memory. Blocking doesn’t occur because you weren’t paying attention or because the memory you’re looking for has faded from your brain. On the contrary, blocking occurs when a memory is properly stored in your brain, but something is keeping you from finding it.
In many cases, the memory block is a memory similar to the one you’re looking for but one that you retrieve instead. This other memory is so intrusive that you can’t think of the memory you want. A common example is if you call your older daughter by your younger daughter’s name, or vice versa. Scientists call blocking memories “ugly stepsisters” because they’re domineering, like the stepsisters in Cinderella. Scientists have used ugly stepsisters experimentally to block memories. In one such experiment, people were asked to pick out the definitions of uncommon words from a selection of possible definitions. When definitions that were similar in sound or in meaning were given along with the accurate definition, more people had memory blocks than when unrelated ones were given.
Brain-imaging studies suggest how blocking might work in the brain. When a person is retrieving a memory, some regions of the brain become more active and others become less active. Scientists interpret this finding to mean that the active regions actually inhibit the other regions. When the right regions are activated, the inhibition of other regions can work in your favor by keeping your brain from calling up irrelevant information. But when you call up an ugly stepsister by mistake, the brain regions that encode it may suppress the regions needed to retrieve the memory you really want.
Scientists think that memory blocks become more common with age and that they account for the trouble older people have remembering other people’s names. But it remains unclear whether tip-of-the-tongue experiences are more common than other age-related memory problems. Nor have researchers determined whether memory blocks are simply caused by the overall slowing of memory retrieval that occurs with age. In any case, there’s encouraging news about blocking. Research shows that people are able to retrieve about half of the blocked memories within just a minute.
Misattribution
Consider the following scenario: You’re asked who “John Smith” is, and you remember quite clearly not only who he is, but also what he’s done lately that’s been in the news. Then you’re asked where you learned these details. You think for a moment and reply that it was on the evening TV news. However, there was no report about John Smith on TV. Instead, you got your information from the friend you had lunch with yesterday.
Right memory, wrong source — that’s one example of misattribution. Misattribution occurs when you remember something accurately in part, but misattribute some detail, like the time, place, or person involved. Another kind of misattribution occurs when you believe a thought you had was totally original when, in fact, it came from something you had previously read or heard but had forgotten about. This sort of misattribution explains cases of unintentional plagiarism, in which a writer passes off some information as original when he or she actually read it somewhere before.
Misattribution happens to everyone. Usually it’s harmless, but it can have profound consequences, particularly in the criminal justice system. In some cases, misattribution on the part of eyewitnesses is responsible for the arrest and conviction of individuals for crimes they didn’t commit.
The older the memory, the more likely it is to suffer misattribution. One study documented how misattribution crept into people’s recollections of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Immediately after the Challenger tragedy, researchers at Emory University asked students to write down what they were doing when they heard the news. A year later, the researchers asked the same students to write down their memories of the event again. These later descriptions were riddled with misattributions. But misattributions can be startlingly strong. When told of the discrepancies, the students had trouble believing that their memories were inaccurate. Indeed, three years later, when the students were once again asked to recall the Challenger explosion, their recollections were closer to their second accounts.
As with several other kinds of memory lapses, misattribution becomes more common with age. Age matters in at least two ways. First, as you age, you absorb fewer details when acquiring information because you have somewhat more trouble concentrating. Second, as you grow older, your memories grow older as well. And old memories are especially prone to misattribution.
Suggestibility
Imagine that you saw someone fleeing from a car as its antitheft alarm was blaring. You didn’t get a good look at the thief, but another person on the street insisted that it was a man wearing a green plaid jacket. Later, when the police show you photos of possible suspects, you’re confused until you see a man dressed in green plaid. Then you point to him.
Suggestibility refers to false memories that you develop because someone or something gives you some key information at the same time that you’re trying to retrieve a memory. Although little is known about exactly how suggestibility occurs in the brain, the suggestion fools your mind into thinking it’s a real memory. Suggestibility is the culprit in memories that adults have of incidents from their childhood that never really happened (see “Are recovered memories real?”).
In several studies, people have been induced to recall false events from their childhood after a researcher planted ideas in their minds. In one study, college students’ parents were asked to complete a questionnaire that asked whether certain events happened to the students. Then the students themselves were asked whether they recalled several events — some of which had actually happened (according to the parents’ responses) and some of which hadn’t. At first, 80%–90% of the students accurately recalled the events that had and hadn’t happened to them. But in later interviews, if a researcher suggested that a false event had actually happened to them when they were children, 20%–40% of the students described some memory of it.
No one knows whether people become more vulnerable to suggestibility as they age, but studies have demonstrated that many children experience it when asked to recollect alleged incidents of sexual abuse. Several studies with preschoolers indicate that suggestive questioning by the police or other adults can lead children to assert that certain events occurred when in fact they didn’t.
Bias
One of the biggest myths about memory is that it works like a camera, recording what you learn with complete accuracy. But even the sharpest memory isn’t a flawless snapshot of reality. In your memory, reality is filtered by your personal biases — experiences, beliefs, prior knowledge, and even your mood at the moment. Your biases affect your memories when they’re being encoded in your brain. And your mood and other biases at the moment when you retrieve a memory can influence what information you actually call up.
Bias can affect all sorts of memories, but among the most interesting examples are people’s recollections of their romantic relationships. In one study, couples who were dating were asked to evaluate themselves, their partners, and their relationships initially and then two months later. During the second session, participants were asked to recall what they had said initially. The people whose feelings for their partners and their relationships had become more negative recalled their initial evaluations as more negative than they really were. On the other hand, people whose feelings for their partners and their relationships had become more loving recalled their initial evaluations as more positive than they really were. Although everyone’s attitudes and preconceived notions bias their memories, there’s been virtually no research on the brain mechanisms behind memory bias or whether they become more common with age.
Persistence
Most people worry about forgetting things. But in some cases people wish they could forget, but can’t. The persistence of memories about traumatic events, negative feelings, and chronic fears is another form of memory problem. Some of these memories accurately reflect horrifying events, while others may be negative distortions of reality.
Two groups of people are especially prone to having persistent, upsetting memories. One group is individuals with depression. Research has shown that depressed people are given to ruminating over unpleasant events in their lives or mistakes that they believe they have made. Dwelling on such negatives also fuels a vicious cycle of increasing depression. The other group with persistent, unwanted memories includes people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a condition that can result from many different sorts of traumatic events — for example, sexual abuse or wartime experiences. Flashbacks, which are persistent, intrusive memories of the traumatic event, are a core feature of PTSD.
Research has shown that persistent memories depend on the activation of those parts of the brain that respond to fear, anxiety, and emotionally charged information. Brain-imaging studies have shown that when people with PTSD recall a persistent, intrusive memory, there is activity in the amygdala as well as in other regions associated with the experience of fear and anxiety. Many people learn to control persistent memories through therapy that involves guided imagery, or visualization. With this technique, a therapist helps the patient learn gradually to envision the traumatic incident without intense fear, eventually lessening PTSD symptoms.
Are recovered memories real?
Recovered memories are vivid, emotionally powerful recollections of events or occurrences from the distant past that a person has not thought of in years. The use of such memories — in particular, as evidence of past child abuse, incest, or other traumatic events — has engendered considerable controversy.
Critics of recovered-memory therapy point out that memory is not a literal register of experience. What we remember — and how we remember it — is influenced by our personalities, as well as our beliefs, hopes, and needs. New experiences interfere with old memories and cause them to distort or decay, and we may fill in the gaps, merge the memories of several events, or confuse what we had imagined or heard about with what we actually witnessed or experienced. Critics charge that recovered memories often reflect the power of suggestion during psychotherapy sessions and that the therapist, an authority figure, plays the key role in encouraging such false memories to emerge. Similarly, when the memory of distant events is a vital aspect of a criminal investigation, police, social workers, and other officials can intentionally or unintentionally influence what a person remembers.
Champions of recovered memory, on the other hand, insist that the more unusual and disturbing the memory, the less likely it is to be false. If anything, they say, people tend to doubt recovered memories of child abuse longer than they should. Advocates say that most recovered memories are spontaneous and are not generated as the result of a therapist’s intervention, although they may be revealed in that context because the therapist creates a safe environment in which to disclose them.
Both sides in this dispute have tried to support their positions with evidence from neurology and cognitive neuroscience, including animal experiments, brain scans, neuropsychological tests, and the examination of brain-damaged patients. But the majority of mental health professionals take a position between the two extremes.
Although there is no established consensus, the following advice may be useful. There are many degrees and several kinds of forgetting. Memories can contain varying elements of truth, partial truth, or distortion, and different individuals have different capacities for remembering and forgetting. A true memory (recovered or persistent) cannot be distinguished from a false one on the basis of internal evidence alone. Instead, people must tolerate some uncertainty. More research is needed on the prevalence of false memories and delayed recall. Eventually, as research clarifies the subtle nuances of how normal memory works, scientists may gain a better understanding of the interplay between knowledge and emotion in the recollection of traumatic experiences and may reach a consensus on the usefulness and reliability of recovered memories.
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Forgetting_Whats_normal.htm
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