Emotions of Memory

I have previously come across the amygdalae in the brain which deals with emotions and some aspects of memory. I found out that emotions can effect how things are learnt, and the intencity of the emotions allows for a better more accurate memory. I now want to see if there are other ways emotions can effect memory.

Taken from http://www.memory-key.com/NatureofMemory/emotion.htm
The memory of strongly emotional images and events may be at the expense of other information. Thus, you may be less likely to remember information if it is followed by something that is strongly emotional. This effect appears to be stronger for women.

Pleasant emotions appear to fade more slowly from our memory than unpleasant emotions, but among those with mild depression, unpleasant and pleasant emotions tend to fade evenly, while older adults seem to regulate their emotions better than younger people, and may encode less information that is negative.

Mood congruence: whereby we remember events that match our current mood thus, when we're depressed, we tend to remember negative events.

Mood dependence: which refers to the fact that remembering is easier when your mood at retrieval matches your mood at encoding (thus, your chances of remembering an event or fact are greater if you evoke the emotional state you were in at the time of experiencing the event or learning the fact)

There were afew intresting things I found on this site one being that women more more likely to not remember things after something emotional. I would link this to a hormanal thing, there hormones and effection the emotions of a person, which then effects the memory. I also found the mood dependance quite intresting and I could relate to what it was saying. Memories are easier to remember when you are in the emotional state when the memory was encoded.

Looking at wiki it had a theory that evolution is responsable for emotions effecting our memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_memory

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 "fight or flight" instinct. Artificially inducing this instinct through traumatic physical or emotional stimuli essentially creates the same physiological condition that heightens memory retention by exiting neuro-chemical activity affecting areas of the brain responsible for encoding and recalling memory.

Contextual effects occur as a result of the degree of similarity between the encoding context and the retrieval context of an emotional dimension. The main findings are that the current mood we are in affects what is attended, encoded and ultimately retrieved, as reflected in two similar but subtly different effects: the mood congruence effect and mood-state dependent retrieval.

I found this artical on science daily which goes into depth about a study of emotion and the brain this is taken from that artical.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/06/040610081107.htm

Second, to delineate the contribution of the emotion and memory-related regions during emotional memory formation, the study used precise anatomical methods, which involved tracing of these regions on each subject's brain image. Thus, it was possible to precisely localize the signal coming from anatomically proximal brain regions. As expected, analysis of the behavioral data revealed evidence that the memories of emotional images were more strongly encoded than the neutral ones. And importantly, the brain scans showed that the emotional memories evoked activity in the amygdala as well as the "medial temporal lobe memory" structures. Specifically, these structures include the hippocampus and associated regions. Moreover, according to Dolcos, the analysis revealed a significant correlation between the strength of activity in the emotion- and memory-related brain regions.

This shows proof that emotions effect memory.
This is lifted from http://sciencenewsmagazine.org/articles/20031108/fob5.asp

Emotionally charged events often seem particularly memorable. But this vivid recall may come at a cost. A new study in England suggests that the same biological process that aids recall of emotional experiences also blocks memories of what happened just before those arousing occurrences took place.

This is important and can effect my work a lot. The event which happen before an hightened emotions is blocked to create a more intence memory. When i first did my burst shot experiments i wanted to progess further by starting lifting frames out of the animation and seeing what effect that has on the piece and how people would precive this.

I have found a second piece of text which talks about an experiment in which women are twice as likely for forget memory after an emotional event, again taken from http://sciencenewsmagazine.org/articles/20031108/fob5.asp

Overall, men and women recalled the emotional words much more often than they did the neutral words. Moreover, the poorest memory occurred for neutral words that were presented immediately before the disturbing words. Women forgot those words twice as often as men did.

By learning about emotions of memory I have wondered what would the effect be if drugs are used to not aid or paralize the memory from working like I have previously looked into but if the emotions are block, which would then effect memory.

Emotions in memory seams to be a double edges sword, you get a stronger memory of the emotional event but what happened before is usualy a blur or forgot all together at the expence of a highted memory.

Image taken from http://www.deltaflow.com/?p=402

On this blog I have found a pill which claims can remove memories, but I have decided to make a new post for this as it is seperate from emotions of memory although it links into it.