This discovery was conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It mainly says that very emotional, painful, shocking memories are are the hardest to forget, especially if they are visual ones. An example it presented was that when you see a footage of soldiers coming back from war, it is more emotional than simply reading it in a headline in the newspaper.
Keith Payne, an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences said that it is easy to forget neutral (as in simple, basic) memories such as a phone number or directions, but to intentionally try to forget an emotional one is really hard. Even a "mild" memory is hard to forget because when people are trying to forget it, they need to mentally separate it first and then block it of the ones you don't want to retrieve. Emotions obstruct this process because you make a connections of these with other parts of your life making it harder to isolate.
The experiments they conducted is to show a word to subjects, such as "murder". By simply showing the word, the subject may or may not have any reaction to it in contrast to the emotions they have while looking at a very violant picture or footage. They found out that not only it is hard to intentionally forget unpleasant memories, that the pleasant ones are also hard to forget.
These studies contributes to understanding how emotions limits mental control and whether by trying to intentionally forget an event can actually cause more pain. But also, if the motivation is enough, individuals with help of some coping strategies can overcome the effects of these memories.
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