Patient CD reported disorientation of place and time following his injuries as well as relearning previously learned information and activities (e.g., using a razor). EF was examined and found to be very confused about social norms (e.g., appropriate attire outside his home). EF exhibited memory loss of his personal experiences (e.g., childhood), and the impaired ability to recognize his wife and parents. JG is the first recorded patient with isolated RA. GH, a mother and a wife, had surgery in August 2002. When GH woke up after the surgery, she believed it was May 1989. Due to her amnesia, GH experienced great difficulty in her social environment, being overwhelmed by relationships to others. DH, a learning disabilities instructor and husband, sustained a closed head injury. He did not show any normal signs of memory loss but he could not recall anything prior to the accident. CDA is a 20-year-old man who fell and experienced head trauma after being unconscious for a little less than an hour. He had a self-identity loss and a retrograde deficit limited to the autobiographical events 5 years before the trauma. He often showed signs of spontaneous speech that was iterative and sometimes incoherent. When he saw his family and friends, he was shocked at how old they looked because he remembered them from 5 years earlier. This case also included amnesia for procedural skills like the fear of shaving or driving, which ultimately was overcome. There were no psychological, neuropsychological, or brain damage problems.
The onset of psychogenic amnesia can be either global (i.e., individual forgets all history) or situation specific (i.e., individual is unable to retrieve memories of specific situations).Patients experiencing psychogenic amnesia have impaired episodic memory, instances of wandering and traveling, and acceptance of a new identity as a result of inaccessible memories pertaining to their previous identity.Recent research has begun to investigate the effects of stress and fear-inducing situations with the onset of RA. Long-term potentiation (LTP) is the process by which there is a signal transmission between neurons after the activation of a neuron, which has been known to play a strong role in the hippocampus in learning and memory. Common changes in the hippocampus have been found to be related to stress and induced LTP. The commonalities support the idea that variations of stress can play a role in producing new memories as well as the onset of RA for other memories. The amygdala plays a crucial role in memory and can be affected by emotional stimuli, evoking RA.Studies of specific cases, such as AMN, support evidence  of traumatic experiences as a plausible cause of RA. AMN escaped a small fire in his house, did not inhale any smoke, and had no brain damage. Nevertheless, he was unable to recall autobiographical knowledge the next day. This case shows that RA can occur in the absence of structural brain damage.After a traumatic head injury, emotional disturbances can occur at three different levels: neurological, reactionary, and long-term disturbances. Neurological disturbances can change emotional and motivational responses.