ally starts to get worse as we get older, and a friend of mine says 'when we have children, and the more we have the worse our memory gets'.Harris and Sunderland (1981) compared subjects aged between 20 and 36 with retired people aged between 69 and 80. They found the younger subjects experienced much more memory failure than the older groupKA First Course in Psychology, Nicky Hayes, 3rd Edition, Harrap Ltd, London, 1984, page 219.There are some types of ageing where memory loss does occur and only affects a very small minority of old people, and an even smaller minority of young people (it is rare in the younger people). It usually occurs as a result of brain damage through 'senile dementia' or 'Alzheimer's disease'. These people become confused and make their memories worse by trying really hard to remember things.It appears that displacement, trace decay and interference theories are all based on the assumption that material becomes lost and is no longer available for retrieval. These factors all have a role to play in forgetting. As some material is irretrievably lost from memory, it is also sometimes the case that we have that memory 'on the tip of our tongue'.Psychologists believe that forgetting occurs as a result of retrieval failure and that we can only retrieve with the aid of cues. Emotional factors also play an important part in determining what is remembered. According to Freud, repression is where we push unpleasant memories from conscious awareness. A situation where repressed memories are thought to occur, (in fact they do occur) is in the areas of child abuse, and where adults are abused. Whatever the age, if we deny it ever happened, then it never happened.Forgetting things happens for many reasons, mentally, emotionally and physically, whatever our age....
