Emotion and memory

Emotion can have a powerful impact on memory. Our most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events and research has revealed that emotional events are more likely to be recalled than more neutral events. However, as described below, emotion does not always enhance memory.

Emotion Enhancing Effects on Memory
Emotionally arousing events are more likely to be recalled later than more neutral events, and the amygdala plays an important role in this enhancement as demonstrated by fMRI studies showing that amygdala activation during encoding predicts later memory for emotional stimuli (Canli et al., 2000), as well as by a number of other studies (LaBar & Cabeza, 2006).

Memory Narrowing
One prominent hypothesis is that emotional arousal leads to a narrowing of attention, in which information in the periphery is less likely to be attended to and therefore less likely to be later remembered (Reisberg & Heuer, 2004). Consistent with this hypothesis are findings of weapon focus, in which witnesses to a crime remember the gun or knife in great detail but remember little else about the scene.

Emotion-Induced Forgetting
Emotionally arousing stimuli can lead to retrograde amnesia for preceding events and anterograde amnesia for subsequent events (Strange et al., 2003). This has been demonstrated in lab studies with lists of words or pictures, in which people show impaired memory for stimuli appearing before or after arousing stimuli.

Depression and Memory
Memory recall tends to be congruent with one's current mood, with depressed people more likely to recall negative events from the past (Hertel, 2004). In addition, depression is often associated with poor memory in general, as outlined here.

Aging and Emotional Memory
The enhancing effects of emotional arousal on later memory recall tend to be maintained among older adults and the amygdala shows relatively less decline than many other brain regions (Mather, 2004). However, older adults also show somewhat of a shift towards favoring positive over negative information in memory, leading to a positivity effect.