wendiesan
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Becky Sharp: Can someone please explain the juror question about: can a body's reaction to certain stimuli trigger suppressed memories/feelings (or words to that effect)?
I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, Becky, but it might be of some value.
When dealing with supposedly repressed or suppressed memories (there is debate over this), the stimuli that bring forward those memories are popularly (not scientifically) referred to as trauma triggers when dealing with PTSD. Some schools of thought connect the label of trauma trigger to certain words or phrases, although there is such variety of triggers, that there is no guarantee that announcing the supposed presence of trauma triggers (ie. trauma trigger warnings) will be of any value to the general population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_trigger
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/ptsd-triggers
http://ptsd.about.com/od/selfhelp/a/CopingTriggers.htm
In fact, the body's senses can be linked to memories. In my experience, and those of my acquaintances, memories that have been dormant for years may come back unbidden when a person smells the fragrance of fresh-baked cookies (grandma's house), wax crayons (first day of school), new car smell (father's last car), Chanel No. 5 (ahh). A phrase of music can remind a person of an occasion, or an emotion. Prima ballerinas have been known to want to throw up when they hear the Overture to Swan Lake as the emotion of stage fright automatically kicks in. People are reminded of a parent's funeral when a certain hymn is played. The taste of oranges can recall a place and time and the people with whom a person has shared an event. So, I think in this question is asking if there was scientific backing to the popular understanding that if a body's senses, in experiencing a particular stimulus, can trigger a repressed memory could it's senses similarly trigger a suppressed memory or feeling.
Dr. D's answer to this question, if I remember correctly, was yes.
[Sidebar re repression/suppression.
http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/ss/defensemech_4.htm]Repression is another well-known defense mechanism. Repression acts to keep information out of conscious awareness. However, these memories don't just disappear; they continue to influence our behavior. For example, a person who has repressed memories of abuse suffered as a child may later have difficulty forming relationships. Sometimes we do this consciously by forcing the unwanted information out of our awareness, which is known as suppression. In most cases, however, this removal of anxiety-provoking memories from our awareness is believed to occur unconsciously.
The senses, for example the sense of smell, have developed over eons, as I understand it, to allow human beings to survive in a variety of situations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/science/05angier.html?_r=0At the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste held in San Francisco late last month, Dr. Herz and other researchers discussed the many ways our sense of smell stands alone. Olfaction is an ancient sense, the key by which our earliest forebears learned to approach or slink off...Yet olfaction is our quickest sense. Whereas new signals detected by our eyes and our ears must first be assimilated by a structural way station called the thalamus before reaching the brain’s interpretive regions, odiferous messages barrel along dedicated pathways straight from the nose and right into the brain’s olfactory cortex, for instant processing.
Importantly, the olfactory cortex is embedded within the brain’s limbic system and amygdala, where emotions are born and emotional memories stored. That’s why smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled, and why the simple act of washing dishes recently made Dr. Herz’s cousin break down and cry. “The smell of the dish soap reminded her of her grandmother,” said Dr. Herz, author of “The Scent of Desire.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/science/05angier.html?_r=0In another presentation, Maria Larsson, an associate professor of psychology at Stockholm University, described the power of smell to serve as an almost magical time machine, with potential for treating dementia, depression, the grim fog of age. Johan Willander and others in her lab have sought to give firm empirical foundation to the old Proustian hypothesis, the idea that smells and aromas, like the famed taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, can help disinter the past.
Studying groups of Swedes whose average age was 75, the researchers offered three different sets of the same 20 memory cues — the cue as a word, as a picture and as a smell. The scientists found that while the word and visual cues elicited associations largely from subjects’ adolescence and young adulthood, the smell cues evoked thoughts of early childhood, under the age of 10.
So perhaps suppressed memories of events in childhood may be more often triggered by the sense of smell than other senses. It may be worth looking into as the questions become more clear from court records.