Psychotherapy information contains much positive and adaptive information, which is inconsistent with the negative self-schemata of anxious people and may lead to memory deficits for psychotherapy information. However, the long-term maintenance of the psychotherapy effect is inseparable from the client's long-term memory of the psychotherapy process and treatment information. The memory of the real treatment process will provide resources for the subsequent changes in the client's daily life, and the effective information obtained by the client from the psychotherapy will be preserved in their memory and experience structure in a certain way. Improving the client's memory of the treatment information is optimization Therefore, it is of great therapeutic significance to improve the memory of psychological treatment information for anxious individuals. At present, clinical studies have begun to attach importance to therapeutic memory, and it has been found that memory support strategies can improve the therapeutic effect. However, there are few relevant empirical studies. Therefore, the present study attempted to use "mental distress problems一active therapeutic solutions" ("problems-solutions" for short) to simulate the interaction between the counselor and the client during psychotherapy, in order to explore whether anxious individuals have memory defects in therapeutic solutions through laboratory studies. And it was investigated whether the metaphor encoding of therapeutic solutions and improving the retrieval intention of mental distress problems can enhance the memory of therapeutic solutions of anxious individuals. It was divided into the following two studies:
The old and new recognition task of solutions was applied in Study 1 to investigate whether metaphorical encoding of solutions has a memory advantage over literal encoding and whether anxious individuals have significantly lower memory for therapeutic solutions than healthy individuals. Study 1 recruited 124 participants (mean age M=23.35, SD=1.58), 62 people with mild anxiety symptoms above were considered as the anxiety group, and the remaining 62 people were considered as the healthy group. The experiment was divided into two stages of memory encoding and memory retrieval. In the memory encoding stage of each item, mental distress problems were presented first, and then metaphorical (or literal) therapeutic solutions were presented. The results showed that :(1) the correct recognition (CR) numbers and memory discrimination d' of the anxious participants were significantly lower than that of the healthy participants; (2) the CR numbers of metaphorical solutions were significantly higher than that of literal solutions. In other words, anxious individuals had worse memory performance for therapeutic solutions than healthy individuals. Metaphorical solutions have a memory advantage over literal solutions, significantly improving the memory of therapeutic solutions in anxious and healthy individuals.
Based on study 1，in view of the characteristics of anxious individuals' avoidance of threatening mental images, Study 2 manipulated the level of individuals' memory retrieval intention for mental distress problems by adding whether to recognize mental distress problems during memory retrieval. The purpose was to investigate whether improving the retrieval intention of problems could enhance the recognition memory of psychotherapy solutions for anxious people. Stu即2 recruited 155 participants (mean age M-- 22.35，SD= 1.81), of whom 76 had mild or higher anxiety symptoms were in the anxiety group and the remaining 79 were in the heap场group. The experiment was divided into two stages of memory encoding and memory retrieval. The memory encoding was the same as Study 1 .However, at the memory retrieval stage on the 7th day, the group with high retrieval intention was asked to recognize the topic words of mental distress problems after recognizing the old and new solutions, so as to improve the retrieval intention of problems, while the group with low retrieval intention only recognized the old and new solutions. The results showed that :(1) The CR numbers and d' of metaphorical and literal solutions of anxious participants in the high retrieval intention group were significantly higher than those in the low retrieval intention group; (2) CR numbers and d' of anxious participants with high retrieval intention were higher than low retrieval intention. The d' of metaphorical solutions of anxious participants with high retrieval intention was higher than their literal solutions and metaphorical solutions of anxious participants with low retrieval intention. These results demonstrate that better encoding of therapeutic metaphors of solutions and stronger retrieval motivation of distress problems can help anxious individuals achieve optimal memory for psychotherapy solutions.
To sum up, based on finding that anxious individuals have poor therapeutic memory, the present study used metaphorical encoding of therapeutic solutions and enhancement of question retrieval intention respectively to improve the therapeutic memory of anxious individuals, aiming at the characteristics of anxious individuals' poor encoding of therapeutic memory and avoidance of retrieval of negative problems. This therapeutic memory enhancement method for anxious individuals is innovative and has practical significance in the maintenance of psychotherapeutic effect of anxious individuals .
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