The research by a team at the University of St Andrews in Scotland showed that though individuals could accurately recall the cause of the traumatic event, they could be trained to forget the consequences and personal meaning associated with that memory.
Dr Saima Noreen, who led the research, said: "The ability to remember and interpret emotional events from our personal past forms the basic foundation of who we are as individuals."
"These novel findings show that individuals can be trained to not think about memories that have personal relevance and significance to them and provide the most direct evidence to date that we possess some kind of control over autobiographical memory," Dr Noreen was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
The research involved participants generating emotional memories in response to generic cue words, such as theatre, barbecue, wildlife and so on.
Participants were asked to recall the cause of the event, the consequence of the event and the personal meaning they derived from the event.
Subjects were then asked to provide a single word that was personal to them which reminded them of the memory.
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In a subsequent session, participants were shown the cue and personal word pairings and were asked to either recall the memory associated with the word pair or to not think about the associated memory.
Interestingly, the findings revealed that while the entire autobiographical episode was not forgotten, the details associated with the memory were.
Specifically, individuals could remember what caused the event, but were able to forget what happened and how it made them feel.
Co-author Prof Malcolm MacLeod said: "The capacity to engage in this kind of intentional forgetting may be critical to our ability to maintain coherent images about who we are and what we are like."
The research is published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.