Emotions can help us remember important details, which contradicts the common belief that emotions make it difficult to recall information. This discovery was made by researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

The interaction between emotion and memory is still a mystery that is being explored. The research demonstrates methods to prevent forgetting important details, challenging existing theories and providing practical approaches for managing emotions to enhance memory.

The research was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General(1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Reconciling opposing effects of emotion on relational memory: Behavioral, eye-tracking, and brain imaging investigations

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Brain’s Response: Emotion and Memory Interaction

In emotional situations, people tend to pay less attention to secondary details and more attention to the primary issue, such as a screaming child, a yelling stranger, or a destroyed car.

The researchers integrated behavioral, attentional, and brain imaging data in three related investigations to create a comprehensive picture of emotion’s influence and explain this involuntary attention shift.

They found that emotion enhances the ability to retrieve contextual (situational) details.

In emotional situations that participants accurately recalled, functional magnetic resonance imaging data showed crosstalk between emotion-processing and recollection-processing brain regions, boosting recollection of contextual details.

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This is contrary to the prevalent view that emotion impairs memory for these details by inhibiting recollection-processing brain regions.

The complementary studies used Beckman’s eye-tracking facilities and one of its 3 Tesla MRI scanners. One study used webcam-based eye tracking, as participants took part remotely.

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“Webcam-based eye-tracking is an emerging technology, and this is the first study of emotional memory to go beyond just validating its effectiveness,” Bogdan said.

Understanding Emotion’s Influence on Memory and Well-Being

Knowing how emotion impacts memories and how to manage them is a major step toward contextualizing memories, increasing well-being and alleviating clinical conditions like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

PTSD is linked to memory decontextualization — a disconnect between the memory of a traumatic event and its surroundings, which causes the memory to be easily triggered by unrelated stimuli.

The researchers hope their findings contribute to strategies to prevent this disconnection and promote a better understanding of memories.

This study also has general applications for enhancing memory. This is especially important for older individuals, as aging is often associated with declines in memory for contextual details.

Developing strategies for actively focusing attention on the entirety of an image or situation, rather than just the main focal point, can help slow memory declines.

“The status quo is that emotion impairs memory for contextual details, but if our relational memory is always impaired when we’re in the middle of something stressful, then there isn’t much that we can do about it, and thus the prospects are rather grim,” Sanda Dolcos said.

But this does not have to be the case.

“Having a recollection-based mindset when we experience and retrieve anything that we want to remember is key to our memory success,” Florin Dolcos said.

Reference:

1. Reconciling opposing effects of emotion on relational memory: Behavioral, eye-tracking, and brain imaging investigations- (https:pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39298200/)

Source-Eurekalert