Category: Research

Pattern | Topic of Daydreams Determine Memory Loss

By Rick Nauert PhD

Have you ever found yourself daydreaming and had difficulty remembering what you were doing before the temporary escape?

If the answer is yes, then you are normal. Now, new research finds that the memory loss is more pronounced if your mind drifts farther — to memories of an overseas vacation instead of a domestic trip, for example, or a memory in the more distant past.

Psychologists have known for a while that context is important to remembering. If you leave the place where a memory was made — its context — it will be harder for you to recall the memory.

Previous studies had also found that thinking about something else — daydreaming or mind-wandering — blocks access to memories of the recent past.

In the new study, psychological scientists wanted to know if the content of your daydreams affects your ability to access a recently acquired memory.

For one experiment, each participant looked at a list of words as they appeared on a computer screen, one at a time. Then they were told to think either about home — either where they’d been that morning or about their parents’ house — where they hadn’t been in several weeks.

Next, the participant was shown a second list of words. At the end of the test, they had to recall as many of the words from the two lists as possible.

Participants who had thought about the place they’d been only a few hours before remembered more of the words from the first list than did participants who had thought back several weeks.

The same was true for memories about place, tested in a second experiment. Those who thought about a vacation within the U.S. remembered more words than those who thought about a vacation abroad.

The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

One practical application of the research might be for people who want to forget about something.

“If there’s something you don’t feel like thinking about, you’re better off remembering a more distant event than a close event, to try to put it out of your mind for a while,” says Peter F. Delaney of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

“It can help you feel like you’re in a different situation.”

Source: Association for Psychological Science

Retrieved from: http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/07/27/topic-of-daydreams-determine-memory-loss/16056.html

 

Pattern | Why Comfort Food Comforts

by CARI ROMM

When the Oxford English Dictionary added a definition for “comfort food” in 1997, it traced the term’s etymology back to a 1977 Washington Post magazine article about Southern cooking: “Along with grits, one of the comfort foods of the South is black-eyed peas.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, though, was wrong. (“I don’t really believe I created the term,” the author of the Post article wrote in 2013, but “since [1977]—if not before then—it has been one of my favorite food descriptors.”) The phrase “comfort food” has been around at least as early as 1966, when the Palm Beach Post used it in a story on obesity: “Adults, when under severe emotional stress, turn to what could be called ‘comfort food’—food associated with the security of childhood, like mother’s poached egg or famous chicken soup,” it reads, beneath the headline “Sad Child May Overeat.”

Regardless of when people found the words to describe it, though, the concept itself is ageless. Sad child may overeat. Or, put another way, certain foods promise solace as much as they do fuel. But what’s murkier is whether comfort food can actually deliver on that promise. Is that the feeling of a soul being soothed, or just the onset of a mac-and-cheese-induced food coma?

According to Shira Gabriel, an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York, Buffalo, the best way to understand the question is to shift the focus away from the food itself.

Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/why-comfort-food-comforts/389613/

Resources: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/food-happiness2.htm