Research News:
Painful, emotional memory harder to forget
CHAPEL HILL, N.C., Aug. 16 (UPI) -- Painful memories that people most likely want to forget may be the toughest to forget, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study found.
Lead author Keith Payne said the brain is adaptive and is able to intentionally forget neutral events such as a friend's outdated phone number or a switched meeting time.
Payne and former psychology graduate student Elizabeth Corrigan found that even "mild" emotional events, like getting a bad grade on a test or a negative comment from a co-worker, can be hard to forget.
The study, published in the September print issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found study subjects could not intentionally forget emotional events as easily as mundane ones, however, both pleasant and unpleasant emotional memories were resistant to intentional forgetting.

The Research:
Read the research behind this story in the Journal of Social Experimental Psychology.