What is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

What is PTSD?
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an emotional illness that that is classified as an anxiety disorder and usually develops as a result of a terribly frightening, life-threatening, or otherwise highly unsafe experience.

What are the symptoms?
A symptom is a departure from normal function or feeling which is noticed by a patient, indicating the presence of disease or abnormality. A symptom is subjective,observed by the patient, and not measured.
What causes PTSD?
Complex post traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) usually results from prolonged exposure to a traumatic event or series thereof and is characterized by long-lasting problems with many aspects of emotional and social functioning.
Briefly explain how memory and emotion relate to PTSD.
 PTSD is an emotional illness when people suffer a terribly frightening, life-threatening, or otherwise highly unsafe, they feel sad, then this becomes a bad memory influences his life later on. As time goes, this problem always reminds him of the sad events. Therefore, he has an emotion illness.

Flashbulb Memory: Brown & Kulik

Aim: Investigate whether dramatic, or personally signifivant events can cause "flashbulb" mempries.

Procedure: Using a retrospective questionnaire assessed the memories of 80 US Ps for the circumstances in which they learned of public events.

Findings: FM more likely for unexpected and personally relevant shocking events.

Conclusion: Dramatic events can cause a physiological imprinting of a memory of the event.

Weakness: It could be that dramatic events are rehearsed more than usual, making memories more durable, rather than any "imprinting" process causing FMs

Flashbulb Memory---Neisser & Harsch

Neisser

Aims:  The flashbulb memory is not always accurate.

Procedure: A questionnaire was administered to 106 participants on the day after the space-shuttle exploded (Jan 1996). Among the questions asked were 5 about how they heard the news: where they were, what they were doing, who told them, what time it occurred etc. Thirty-two months later the participants were asked to complete the questionnaire again and their results compared to the original.

Findings:The findings showed that memories had in fact dimmed. Of a potential 220 ‘facts’ produced in the original questionnaire, they were partially or completely wrong on 150 of them. Interestingly participants were not aware of this fall off in performance, being highly confident in their ability to recall accurately.

 

Conclusions: A conclusion of the study is that so-called ‘flash-bulb memories are no more accurate than other memories. The results suggest that what is different is the confidence that people have in their memories associated with significant events.

Weakness: The space-shuttle exploded is interesting for every participants, since maybe some participants who have less interesting remember less than others.

Alzheimer's Disease

       Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a serious degenerative brain disease. People who suffer from this disease will lose memory, difficultly speak and understand languages, also has problems with focusing attention, impaired movement or altered personality. 

From the video The Forgetting we watched in the class, the patents suffer that losing ability to take care of themselves and the always confuse ordinary things, even forget their nearest family. Since their family members have to give up their jobs in order to take care of the patients. All the medical costs with the disease are over 100 billion dollars annually. Since AD is not only a social tragedy but also economic tragedy. In addition, the percentage of people with Alzheimer’s disease increases as age pasts 65. In America the number increases 10 times compare to 15 years ago. When the baby boomers star to get this disease, these numbers are going to explode.

 

It seems we have to take step to control the rising diseases rate. However, it is despair that there is no cure for this disease. The only way is using medicine to slow down the illness. Many people will curious that what causes Alzheimer’s disease? There are two main effects: plaques and tangles. Scientists think they block nerve cells’ ability to communicate with each other, making it difficult for the cells to survive.

At last, I hope the scientists can find out a way to cure Alzheimer’s disease patients. Since patients don’t suffer losing memory any more and their family can take an easier life. 

Schema

“Schemas are cognitive structured (mental templates or frames) that represent a person’s knowledge about objects, people or situations.” Schema theory states that what we already know will influence the outcome of information processing, since it can affect our cognitive processes. Because schema is usually beside on our stored information, it can both help and hinder the accurate recall of memory. From Bartlett, 1932, we get an idea that cultural schema influences our memory. All of participants recall the story in various ways which can make it more conventional and acceptable on their own cultural perspective. For example, the word “canoe” is often substituted for “boat”. Another experiment from French and Richards (1993) proves that how stored information hinder participants’ memory. How do we get this solution? Participants who are required to draw the clock by memory usually draw the number four represented as "IIII" instead of "IV", because they use their stored knowledge.