According to a new study, people who frequently worry about being rejected or abandoned by loved ones are more likely to create false memories because of anxiety. Explanations.
- People with high anxiety in their relationships with others often believe that they are not worthy of love and attention, intensely fear that other people will reject them, and spend a lot of time overanalyzing their relationships.
- To arrive at the results of their study, Nathan Hudson’s team conducted three different surveys with students. The number of study participants ranged from 200 participants to over 650.
American researchers have found that adults with anxiety about their relationships with others tend to remember details incorrectly more often than people with other personality types. This is revealed a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Study participants were randomly assigned to watch a 20-minute video of a woman talking either about her tumultuous breakup with a man or about another topic, such as shopping or the environment. Another group of volunteers got the same information, but only from listening to an audio message or reading a transcript. All groups took a memory test immediately afterwards.
Anxiety often leads to over-analyzing the emotions others show
Result: people who are often afraid of being rejected or abandoned by their loved ones tend to create incorrect memories more often than others when they saw the person transmitting the information on the screen.
According to the authors of this study, seeing the speaker could be a factor of memory distortion, because people who are very anxious in their relationships with others tend to be hypervigilant in monitoring facial expressions. They also tend to misjudge the emotional states they perceive in others.
“We think people who are very anxious about how they relate to others are probably intensively analyzing what’s being said in the videos we’ve shown them,” said Nathan Hudson, professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in a communicated. Their own thoughts and feelings about the video may have been ‘mixed up’ with the actual content of the video in their minds.”
Memory: our personality can affect our abilities
This finding illustrates how our personalities can potentially affect our memory abilities.
“It is important to understand that our brain does not store textual audio or video clips of events that happen to us.“, adds the professor. “Instead, it stores snippets of information about our experiences, and when we try to recall a memory, it combines stored information and makes its best guess of what happened.“.”As you can imagine, this process can be quite error-prone.“, he continues.
This anxious feeling about relationships with others, English-speaking researchers call it “anxious attachment” (attachment anxious). Anxious attachment usually develops in childhood due to a bad relationship with a parent. It often continues into adulthood. Previous research has shown that this personality type can predict the likelihood that a person will forget certain details, especially those related to relationships. But this study is one of the first to show that anxious attachment actively makes affected individuals more likely to mistakenly remember events or details that never happened.
