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Costanzi M, Cianfanelli B, Santirocchi A, et al. Forgetting Unwanted Memories: Active Forgetting and Implications for the Development of Psychological Disorders. J Pers Med. 2021;11(4)doi: 10.3390/jpm11040241.
Costanzi, M., Cianfanelli, B., Santirocchi, A., Lasaponara, S., Spataro, P., Rossi-Arnaud, C., & Cestari, V. (2021). Forgetting Unwanted Memories: Active Forgetting and Implications for the Development of Psychological Disorders. Journal of personalized medicine, 11(4), . https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm11040241
Costanzi, Marco, et al. "Forgetting Unwanted Memories: Active Forgetting and Implications for the Development of Psychological Disorders." Journal of personalized medicine vol. 11,4 (2021). doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm11040241
Costanzi M, Cianfanelli B, Santirocchi A, Lasaponara S, Spataro P, Rossi-Arnaud C, Cestari V. Forgetting Unwanted Memories: Active Forgetting and Implications for the Development of Psychological Disorders. J Pers Med. 2021 Mar 26;11(4). doi: 10.3390/jpm11040241. PMID: 33810436; PMCID: PMC8066077.
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J Pers Med. 2021 Mar 26;11(4). doi: 10.3390/jpm11040241.

Forgetting Unwanted Memories: Active Forgetting and Implications for the Development of Psychological Disorders.

Journal of personalized medicine

Marco Costanzi, Beatrice Cianfanelli, Alessandro Santirocchi, Stefano Lasaponara, Pietro Spataro, Clelia Rossi-Arnaud, Vincenzo Cestari

Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Sciences, Lumsa University, 00193 Rome, Italy.
  2. Department of Psychology, Sapienza University, 00185 Rome, Italy.
  3. Department of Economy, Universitas Mercatorum, 00100 Rome, Italy.

PMID: 33810436 PMCID: PMC8066077 DOI: 10.3390/jpm11040241

Abstract

Intrusive memories are a common feature of many psychopathologies, and suppression-induced forgetting of unwanted memories appears as a critical ability to preserve mental health. In recent years, biological and cognitive studies converged in revealing that forgetting is due to active processes. Recent neurobiological studies provide evidence on the active role of main neurotransmitter systems in forgetting, suggesting that the brain actively works to suppress retrieval of unwanted memories. On the cognitive side, there is evidence that voluntary and involuntary processes (here termed "intentional" and "incidental" forgetting, respectively) contribute to active forgetting. In intentional forgetting, an inhibitory control mechanism suppresses awareness of unwanted memories at encoding or retrieval. In incidental forgetting, retrieval practice of some memories involuntarily suppresses the retrieval of other related memories. In this review we describe recent findings on deficits in active forgetting observed in psychopathologies, like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Moreover, we report studies in which the role of neurotransmitter systems, known to be involved in the pathogenesis of mental disorders, has been investigated in active forgetting paradigms. The possibility that biological and cognitive mechanisms of active forgetting could be considered as hallmarks of the early onset of psychopathologies is also discussed.

Keywords: forgetting; neurotransmitter system; psychopathologies

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