Our emotional experiences can "hangover" as physiological and internal brain states, despite the emotional event having ended.
This emotional induction effects how we view, act and bias our memory and recollection of events.
These are the conclusions of a new study published in Nature Neuroscience today, December 26, titled Emotional brain states carry over and enhance future memory formation. It was previously known that emotional arousal can produce lasting vivid memories, but not whether emotion enhances memory formation. The researchers set out to assess if exposure to such emotional stimulus would bias future brain activity.
Lila Davachi, an associate professor in NYU's Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science and senior author of the study, further expained:
"How we remember events is not just a consequence of the external world we experience, but is also strongly influenced by our internal states—and these internal states can persist and color future experiences"
Emotional experiences have been known to be better remembered then nonemotional experiences. This new study demonstrates nonemotional experiences following emotional ones were also better remembered.
People viewed a series of scenes containing emotional content. After 10 to 30 minutes, one of the group of subjects viewed nonemotional scenes, then followed by emotional ones again. Both groups of subjects had their brain activity and physiological arousal measured with an fMRI. Memory tests of viewing the images were administered six hours later to see accuracy of various memories recalled.
Those who experienced emotions from the emotion-stimulating images had better long-term memory recall of subsequent emotionally-neutral images, compared to those who were not exposed to emotional imagery beforehand.
The study concludes that our emotional experiences and the brain states that are associated with them, are carried over for 20 to 30 minutes and influence the way we process and remember experiences that are not emotional. Our own experience and the emotion we have associated with their experience can persist in time and bias how we encode and recollect new or unrelated information.
This begs the question if it's better to be in an emotionally positive or emotionally negative state to study or remember certain information. My suspicion is that this salient recollection is for experience, and not specifically information or knowledge itself.
References:
- Is there such a thing as an emotional hangover? Researchers find that there is
- Emotional brain states carry over and enhance future memory formation
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