CARGA PERMANENTE

information in the form of ‘working models’.

Emotion may thus affect the retrieval cycle at any of these key points.

The diagram below illustrates the relationship between the semantic entities of the retrieval cycle; it is not a diagram of the retrieval cycle itself, because it is not possible to demonstrate retrieval of a Headed Record in the same diagram showing formation of a Headed Record- retrieval cannot take place in relation to a Record which has not yet been formed.

The diagram shows that attention is paid to a current event, to the prototype record retrieved by that event and to the arousal (for example, the degree of anxiety or excitement) created by the event. Information from all these sources is included in the Record and some of it, in unprocessed form, in the Heading of that Record. This Record, the primary Record o f an event, can then be retrieved on subsequent occasions by a Description which matches the Heading of that Record. Once retrieved into the interpreter buffer, the Record may be available to conscious attention and also to interpretation by comparison with a task specification and the information contained in control Records. A secondary Record may be formed which combines information from

both the primary Record and the interpreter. This process can be repeated many times with the gradual formation of working model Records. These may become the prototype Records which are drawn on when a new primary Record is formed.

Figure 6. To illustrate the relationship between the semantic entities of the retrieval cycle

i pre-retrieval and post-retrieval processes are illustrated in more detail than in figure 4., chapter 2) Emotional records Attention

I

Prototype RECORD formation ^ — ►Event (1) arousal ofRecord HEADING primary RECORD ---retrieval ^ Interpreter task specification control RECORDS

working model Secondary RECORDS ---RECORD ( 2 f (prototype)' Attention Event (2) primary RECORD (copied into interpreter buffer) Conscious attention Secondary RECORD (1)

formation of new primary Record etc.

Arousal

[Note:- retrieval involves copying the Record into the interpreter buffer]

The flow charts of formation and retrieval of Records can be illustrated by dividing the above diagram into three parts, one for formation of Records, one for retrieval and one to show formation of secondary Records:-

The first diagram a) below illustrates the process whereby attention is paid to an event, to the information in a prototype Record and to the arousal generated by the event; some information from all these sources is then incorporated into the primary Record which is formed at the time of the event and some information, in unprocessed form, becomes part of the Heading of that event.

a) Figure 7. To illustrate the formation of Primary Records Task specification Attention Prototype REC >> Event Arousal Heading Primary RECORD

The diagram below shows that once a primary Record has been formed, it may be retrieved on subsequent occasions by a Description that matches the Heading of the Record. The primary Record is then retrieved into the interpreter buffer, where it becomes available for further processing.

b) Figure 8.T0 illustrate the retrieval of Records:- Event(l) ^ Description (abc)

retrieval interpreter primary Record interpreter buffer Heading (abp.) primary Record_____

The next diagram illustrates key features of the further processing which may take place in relation to a retrieved Record. When attention is paid to the retrieved primary Record, the information in the primary Record is drawn on to form the contents of a secondary Record which may also contain information from other sources, such as other people's accounts of the event and the subject's own imaginative reconstruction of the event. This process can be repeated many times, eventually leading to the formation of'working model' Records.

c) Figure 9. To illustrate the formation of secondary Records

retrieval time 1 time 2 conscious attention time n pnmary Record Secondary Record (1) Secondary Record (2) working model Records Discussion

1. Emotion mav focus attention to stimuli or deflect attention, thus altering what is perceived and therefore what is available for encoding in memory.

This could result from:-

i) arousal or sympathetic nervous system activation, which then itself becomes the focus of attentional mechanisms, so that there is less capacity for processing of

external events.

Mandler explores the question as to what is perceived as psychologically central and argues that this is determined by the amount of initial attention assigned to it (Mandler

initially attracted a lesser degree of attentional focus; this is a direct and automatic effect of the autonomic nervous system on attention. There is also an indirect effect, in that autonomic arousal narrows attention by occupying some of the limited capacity of attention-consciousness and thereby limiting the remaining available attentional capacity to those events or stimuli which have originally been perceived as central; under stress, events perceived as peripheral will receive even less attention, whereas ‘central’ tasks receive more attention. This explains the apparent poorer memory for details of an emotional rather than neutral event found by Christianson and Loftus; however, in a series of experiments showing colour slides of varying degrees of emotional content, they found that people remember different detail information from emotional events than they might remember from events which are neutral in character. Emotional events lead to better retention of central information but worse retention of peripheral information than neutral events. They feel that this is in line with the view that emotionality affects the selectivity of attention, so that a highly emotional event is accompanied by attentional narrowing with fewer details being processed and with the focus on central details (Christianson and Loftus 1991) .

Clinical illustrations

This is a common experience for anyone who is anxious, say a person attending an interview who may be so aware of his or her heart beating faster, hands trembling, sweating and muscles tensed that it becomes harder to concentrate on questions being asked and to evaluate what the most appropriate reply might be.

Patients who suffer from panic attacks also describe such attentional narrowing such as a male patient on a tube train journey, during which he suffered a panic attack. He was acutely aware of his heart beating, his own breathing and other bodily sensations and his attention also focussed on his desire to get to the next station where he could get out. He noticed every change in the speed of the train, but was otherwise unaware of anything or anyone around him.

As is so often the case, novelists have an intuitive understanding of such psychological processes and an excellent account of the attentional narrowing which accompanies high arousal is given in ‘The Ghost Road’ by Pat Barker, where she describes a moment when one of the characters. Rivers, accidentally drops the torch he was holding in a cave whose walls are covered with thousands ofbats:-

‘Then the walls lifted off and came towards them. Rivers barely had time to see the beam of light become a tunnel filled with struggling shapes before he was enclosed in flapping squeaking screaming darkness, blinded, his skin shrinking from the contact that never came.

He stood with eyes closed, teeth clenched, senses so inundated they’d virtually ceased to exist, his mind shrunk to a single point of light. Keep still, he told himself, they won’t touch you. And after that he didn’t think at all but endured, a pillar of flesh that the soles of his feet connected to the earth, the bones of his skull vibrating to the bats’

unvarying high-pitched scream. ..

Inside the cave. Rivers and Njiru opened their eyes. Rivers was not aware of having moved during the exodus, indeed would have sworn that he had n o t, but he discovered that he was gripping Njiru’s hand’ (Barker 1995, p i67)

ii) preexisting (prototype) Headed Records patterning awareness of the present situation to which the individual is reacting.

These Records may consist of representations of previous external events combined with representations of the mental processes, emotions and degree of arousal accompanying that previous event. These Records determine which aspects of a new situation become the focus of attention, in other words, which aspects are perceived as central. Information about emotion included in such Records can therefore influence or determine the pattern of awareness in a new situation. The meaning, including the emotional significance, which these Records give to the new situation may itself produce SNS arousal and so contribute to i) above. In a meta-analysis of studies on mood-state dependent memory, Ucross supports this argument, saying that ‘the environment is in part what the subject makes it, so that the context is not a static feature of one’s experiences but a dynamic

one. Certain aspects of the environment will be more or less important, partly depending on the particular focus of the individual and this perceived context will influence the way one analyses and encodes events'' (my italics) (Ucross 1989).

Thus both preexisting emotion and emotion created in the new situation may influence attention. This patterning of present perception by past experience provides a major focus for analytic work, primarily through the way in which the patient’s relationship to the analyst is patterned by his or her past relationships; these experiences are stored as representations in Records. These Records contain complex representations of parental and other key attachment figures, formed partly from actual experience of these people and partly from imagination, fantasy and dreams during childhood and early adult life; they also contain self-representations, formed in a similar way, I have described the kinds of information which such Headed Records may contain at the end of the first chapter and have already given a clinical illustration in the section above, on an information processing account of emotion.

To illustrate this particular aspect of the influence of past ‘emotional’ Records on present perception, I will describe:-

Clinical illustration.

A male patient who had asthma as a child; during his therapy he described experiencing a profoundly oppressive state of mind, like a heavy weight pressing down on him. He felt unable to escape from it, unable to think about anything else but also unable to think clearly about the oppressiveness either. He recognised that it was the mental equivalent of an asthma attack, which he had to endure and which took him over completely until it passed. He realised that he was in a constant state of dread, waiting for the oppressiveness to come again, just as he had dreaded an asthma attack in childhood. His previous experience of asthma was patterning his perception of his own mental state in adult life, so that any oppressive unpleasant emotion was experienced as though it were an asthma attack; it was some time before he was able to experience the oppressiveness in a different way, but this did happen when he suddenly recognised that the

oppressiveness was an anxiety state. The oppressiveness had previously been organised and given meaning by Records of childhood asthma, but a shift occurred when I

interpreted that it was not only his asthma which had been oppressive in childhood but also his relationship with his mother, partly because of their shared anxiety about his asthma. He recognised that he could not imagine intimacy being enjoyable and that he had always envied his brother’s much freer relationship with his mother. One effect of this interpretation was to enable him to begin to experience oppressiveness as a mental and emotional experience, rather than a physical one; one might say that my

interpretation acted as a Description which retrieved emotional Records of oppressive states of anxiety, envy and guilt. These could then be used to organise his present sense of oppressiveness, which he had previously only been able to make sense of in terms of childhood asthma and so as a physical experience.

To return to the patient’s relationship with the analyst, the patterning of the patient’s perception of the analyst by past experience (and therefore by past Records) forms the basis of the transference.

Clinical illustration.

A clinical illustration concerns a female patient with whom I increasingly felt that my interpretations were wrong, useless, mistimed or irrelevant; I became quite anxious, fearing her silent contempt for my stupidity, whereas she seemed to feel that all my remarks showed that she was the one who was getting things wrong. In one session she told me about her feelings of despair after a row with her partner which had made her feel that he was malevolent towards her and wanted to hurt and damage her. This description enabled me to recognise that she feared that all my interpretations were also attacks and that she feared that I hated her, so that my interpretations became for her, malevolent attacks to be kept out rather than insights which she could take in; I was able to draw on her descriptions of her childhood relationship with her mother to put into words her unconscious fear that I hated her in the same way that she felt her mother had hated her. She recognised the truth of this and found it a relief that I had put her unconscious fear

into words; she could then begin to draw on other Records to organise her perception of me, whereas she had previously been structuring her experience of me through the Records containing representations of a hostile and cruel mother who hated her. This structuring had been unconscious, so that mechanism 3, the diversion of conscious attention from a Record had also been operating.

Several months later, a dream she recounted seemed to provide further support for the interpretation I had made at that point, and also demonstrated that one accurate

interpretation does not erase such Records which pattern her perception of me. The patient dreamt that she was walking down Holywell ( representing her wish to be wholly well?) in Oxford with a woman; she then seemed to be lying down and the woman was carrying an egg which she opened and which was partly empty. The woman then offered her the egg to eat, but my patient noticed that there were two horrible yellow worms in it and she said she did not want to eat it. The woman then said ‘Oh, you don’t like worms do you’ and stuffed the egg into her mouth. The reference to my couch (lying down) would indicate that the woman in the dream represented me and that she was still afraid that I would attack her and force bad interpretations and bad objects into h e r.

Whilst the two previous clinical illustrations show the way in which Records of the patient’s relationship with his or her mother have structured his or her perception of present experiences, it can also be Records of the relationship with a patient’s father which organise the perception o f the therapist, even when the therapist is female.

Clinical illustration.

A male patient often talks about how badly he functions professionally and wonders whether he is any good at his job at all; he often seems to feel that he is

professionally ‘inferior’ to me. When I commented on this he recognised that he thinks I must be very critical of him. This is just like his relationship with his father who never praised him and always made him feel that he could never achieve the same level of skill and competence as his father; as a child my patient would be asked to sweep the leaves

up in the driveway and he would spend ages trying to ensure that he had raked up every single leaf. His father would then come and inspect his work, make clear to him that it was not good enough and would then sweep the leaves himself to his own satisfaction. The Records of this critical father, whether fact, fantasy or a combination of both were organising his perception of me.

I have not yet clarified the characteristics of the information contained in ‘emotional ‘ Records which pattern awareness of present events by determining which aspects of a new situation will become the focus of attention. Are there particular kinds of

information in these Records which distinguishes them from any other Records? I intend to leave this discussion until later in this section.

2.Emotion mav prevent particular prototype Records being retrieved by a current event even when attention has been paid to a stimulus» Emotional Records mav lead to the formation of a task specification which prevents retrieval of prototvpe Records which contain certain categories of information

Information about a current event is organised and so given meaning, through the

retrieval of a ‘comparison’ or ‘prototype’ Record, the Record of an earlier, similar event; key aspects of the current event information will be used to form a Description which may match the Heading and so retrieve the required Record. This prototype Record would help to give meaning to the present situation through its own structure; this might, for example contain information about protagonists who are involved in the current event, their likely motivation and attitudes and likely outcomes of particular actions in the light of this information. This process relies on the successful formation of a Description and on the successful matching of an appropriate Heading.

However, owing to the person’s prior history, a task specification may have been set up which has the effect of prohibiting the use of certain material in a Description. For example, if a particular individual has become associated with traumatic outcomes, then

task specifications may be laid down to prevent that individual’s identity entering into a Description. This in turn, would minimise the chance o f the associated traumatic Records being retrieved. A clinical example of such a process is given in clinical illustration E below. If the matching process fails in this way, possible alternative outcomes are:-

1) the stimulus (information about a current event) may not be encoded and stored at all.

2) the matching process may be successful with different prototype Records. 3) a Record may be formed in which the encoding of stimulus event information would be minimal, without the benefit of a prototype Record.

The key issue in relation to this aspect of the effect of emotion on the retrieval cycle is

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