Self Reflection Paper

In the article You Have No Idea What Happened by Maria Konnikorva there is a quote near the end of the reading that really sums up human memory. Lila Davachi, a N.Y.U. neuroscientist who performed an experiment on emotional memories said that “the goal of memory isn’t to keep the details. It’s to be able to generalize from what you know so that you are more confident in acting on it.” This experiment was to test people’s memory after getting an electric shock to images. The results showed that people’s memory of the images tied with the shocks were enhanced as well as similar images from a test before without any shocks. Davachi was not just referring exclusively of the people that participated in the experiment, but to humankind as a whole.

A bit surreal today as I sit down and write my first paper in almost 20 years. I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to be very concise in my communication, to the point and easy to skim the important facts to ensure what I need to get across will be read. The fact that I am having some emotional response to the stress related to routinely writing papers that ‘feel long’ is just a great example of some of what I learned from my MBTI/Firo B results.

Box 6.1 describes some of the advantages of qualitative methods, while Section 3 discusses the use of interviews and ethnography to study friendships. Chapter 9: Sections 2, 3 and 4 provide information relevant to the question, they describe a number of experiments carried out in order to enhance our understanding of memory. Section 3 and Box 9.2: Why do it this way? are especially relevant, as they consider some of the limitations of experiments with regard to the application of memory research to real-life contexts. You might want to reflect on this when evaluating the contribution of experiments to the understanding of human behaviour and performance.

To begin with, As far as I can remember, there was not an event that was important. There was a whole lot of mistakes here and there and sometimes, I learned from them. Other times, I just forgot about it. However, there were still some memories that I wanted to treasure for a long time. It is quite embarrassing to be honest but thinking back I could argue that I was still a naive kid. Even up to now, I am still a young adult who needs to learn more about the outside world.

Adlerian psychotherapists often ask their clients about early recollections. What are the assumptions of this technique and how does it facilitate the therapeutic process?

Adlerian therapy can be best described as an art form. There are many ways for a therapist to use Adlerian techniques in practice. In regards to a general outline of this type of therapy, there are twelve main stages. According to Henry Stein (Stein &Edwards, 1998), these twelve stages are the empathy-relationship stage, information stage, clarification stage, encouragement stage, interpretation and recognition stage, knowing stage, missing experience stage, doing differently stage, reinforcement stage, community feeling stage, goal-redirection stage and the support and launching stage.

When I was about five years old I had something happen to me that would change forever. My life before this was not the best and was really confusing to understand and that was because I was always moving into different houses with my mom and would always have a new dad which as a little kid you don’t really know what is going on and have to just deal with it. My mother was not the best and did not take really good care of me.

In “The Time of Our Lives,” the first chapter in Sven Birkerts’s The Art of Time in Memoir, Birkerts’s describes that as he aged “there came a point in [his] life when memories and feelings started coming in loud and clear.” He explains that over the span of many years, the emergence of discontinuous memories began to tell a story and before he knew it “a memoir had announced itself.” According to Birkerts, an essential characteristic of memoir is discovering and utilizing involuntary memory to restore forgotten experiences and form logical connections between them. In order to understand involuntary memory, one must first understand voluntary memory.

During the session, Dr. Carlson utilized multiple interventions that indicated his adherence to Adlerian Theory to include lifestyle analysis, specifically, exploring birth order and early recollections. As Dufrene et al. (2016) posited that the goal of Alderian therapy is “to help a client identify and understand mistaken beliefs about self, others, and life; make changes in those beliefs; and thus participate more fully in a social world”, an integral part of the identification process is assessing and understanding the lifestyle of the client (p.135). Through the use of lifestyle analysis in the form of questioning, the

Primo Levi explores memory in a much deeper fashion than society. The fact that Levi devoted his time to a subject society does not care to pay much attention to, is attractive to me. It is interesting the way Levi presents and supports his theories. For example, Levi argues that memory is selective. Levi then uses the example:

Most people are very convinced that they have memories of past experiences because of the event itself or the bigger picture of the experience. According to Ulric Neisser, memories focus on the fact that the events outlined at one level of analysis may be components of other, larger events (Rubin 1). For instance, one will only remember receiving the letter of admission as their memory of being accepted into the University of Virginia. However, people do not realize that it is actually the small details that make up their memories. What make up the memory of being accepted into the University of Virginia are the hours spent on writing essays, the anxiety faced due to fear of not making into the university and the happiness upon hearing

A traumatic event that happened was when there was a fire. I remember that the fire was just a mile from our house and that we would have to evacuate. My family I loaded the car as fast as we could. We packed as much as we could and everyone else in the neighborhood were also packing and moving out. We moved out, but got stuck in traffic. The fire was literally behind us, burning acres of grass and forests. My sister had asthma, and so she had to fight it off by constantly coughing and such for she didn’t have her inhaler. She coughed all the way until we had gotten to safety and she had gotten an inhaler. I remembered leaving my pet dog, Penn at home, and so I rushed back by myself to let him out. Fire was right near the house, and I tried

In the article “False Memories for Highly Aversive Early Childhood Events: Effects of Guided Imagery and Group Influence” the researches wanted to research the connection between guided memories and group influence on early childhood memories. They believed that the affects of guided memories and group influence would be considerable by themselves, but also when used together.

Loftus and Palmer support the reconstructive memory hypothesis. They believe that information gathered at the time of an icident is

One such variable is the family specific knowledge that a volunteer has accumulated over the course of their life. Loftus, (1993) suggested that early childhood memories are greatly influenced by one's amassed, family knowledge. For example, a participant who knows that his or her cousin was closely involved in their upbringing is likely to guess that he or she was present at an important event without any actual memory of the fact. Contributing factors to this are family stories, photographs, home movies, etc. The variance of memories between participants also makes it hard to convert what is reported into significant terms. For example, my earliest memory is from when I was about four years old and my grandmother gave me a piece of amethyst in a wooden quart basket similar to one you buy berries in. This information given its degree of accuracy is quite difficult to generalize since every other person will recount a unique story. A method used by experimenters to compensate for this is the targeting of a specific, datable event common to many individuals. In the 1993 experiment by Usher and Neisser, these 'target events' consisted of the birth of a younger sibling, a hospitalization, the death of a family member and a family move. The use of targeted recall has helped solve one problem with infantile amnesic research but as we will see there are still many problems with the experimental