How do our emotions influence our memories?
The truth is that not everyone can remember everything, but there can be some circumstances where some memories are recalled more than others, especially considering school as a factor. Well let’s start off with a scenario: You’re taking a test at school, and suddenly you get nervous since you don’t know the answer to a question. Your nervousness may cause you to forget everything you studied and get a bad grade. To start off, your emotions are created based on how you act, and they eventually have a strong hold on your brain. For instance, coming back to the scenario, if you didn’t do well on the test, it creates a sad/disappointing emotion in you, causing you to remember that you failed your expectations. From looking at this, emotions play a huge role in our lives, and they erupt when we do certain things that our mind doesn’t accept or is delighted to accept. For example, happiness and sadness have the most impact on our brains since those are the emotions we feel often, so whenever you’re happy, you would always have a memory that you cherish. Events where our emotions are affected so much can lead to creating longer lasting memories of them. When we feel little or no emotional attachment to an event, we don’t seem to recollect it later on since it doesn’t stay in our mind that long. Also, emotions don’t have to only impact long-term memories since they’re also applicable to short-term memories (relating to the situation above). If we’re really stressed out before taking a test, there’s a possibility for us to not remember the content that we studied since we’re concentrating on our nervousness. A cognitive psychologist, Donald MacKay, did an emotional Stroop test where different words in different colors/subjects were given to the participants. The result was that words that had an emotional attachment to it were recalled more frequently than words that had less emotional attachment to it. Therefore, people have it easier remembering their memories that remind them of intensive emotions than people who don’t have any emotional attachment to the memory(ies). Our memories that we experience with intense emotions are more secure in our brains because it reminds us of things we have cherished in the past (or any time really), or events where we have suffered so that we can remain cautious and stay positive. For instance, the memory of your graduation or the day of September 11, 2001 can be highly recalled when asked to do so since you have some sort of connection with that event (whether you learned about it, family is involved, etc.). To sum up, our emotions create a sort of a bond with our memories, causing us to remember them more frequently since it can remind us of the lessons we’ve learnt or the good times we’ve had to ensure that we’re living our lives the best as we could.
Resources:
https://www.psychologistworld.com/emotion/emotion-memory-psychology
https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/contentgroups/sasp/poster_gallery/poster97.pdf
https://www.cogneurosociety.org/memory_addis_yia/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200713144408.htm
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