Emotion And Memory
Emotion can have a powerful impact on memory. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events.
The activity of emotionally enhanced memory retention can be linked to human evolution; during early development, responsive behavior to environmental events would have progressed as a process of trial and error. Survival depended on behavioral patterns that were repeated or reinforced through life and death situations. Through evolution, this process of learning became genetically embedded in humans and all animal species in what is known as flight or fight instinct.
Artificially inducing this instinct through traumatic physical or emotional stimuli essentially creates the same physiological condition that heightens memory retention by exciting neuro-chemical activity affecting areas of the brain responsible for encoding and recalling memory. This memory-enhancing effect of emotion has been demonstrated in a large number of laboratory studies, using stimuli ranging from words to pictures to narrated slide shows, as well as autobiographical memory studies. However, as described below, emotion does not always enhance memory.
Read more about Emotion And Memory: Arousal and Valence in Memory, Memory of Felt Emotion, Emotion Regulation Effects On Memory, Emotion-induced Forgetting, Depression and Memory, Dementia and Emotional Memory, Aging and Emotional Memory
Famous quotes containing the words emotion and/or memory:
“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“There must be a solemn and terrible aloneness that comes over the child as he takes those first independent steps. All this is lost to memory and we can only reconstruct it through analogies in later life....To the child who takes his first steps and finds himself walking alone, this moment must bring the first sharp sense of the uniqueness and separateness of his body and his person, the discovery of the solitary self.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)