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The time you
were mugged at gunpoint in the parking garage, or the
moment you saw
your newborn for the first time—such experiences
remain vivid
for a lifetime. Countless studies show that the more emotional
that an experience is, the better we remember it. But not all
emotional experiences are created equal, according to a study in
the July 5, 2005, Journal of Neuroscience. People appear
to recall events that directly preceded a happy event and forget
those that came before a sad one.
German
researchers showed volunteers a series of 8 photos, each
with a
descriptive title beneath. Seven of the eight belonged to the
same category, for example, “apple, pear, banana, grapefruit”
and so on. One item was an oddball, such as “fire truck.” As
would be expected people tended to remember the oddball item
better.
Sometimes the
oddball item was emotionally positive, such as a
cute baby or a
pretty flower; other times the item was negative, such as a
bloody severed hand. Since emotional memories are more durable,
either the positive or negative image evoked a stronger
emotional response, and thus would be remembered more vividly
than the neutral images.
However, the volunteers tended to have better recall for items
that
came before the positive images, compared to those that came
before the negative ones. The researchers speculate that this
may have something to do with the role of emotion in learning.
The brain may have evolved a bias toward remembering events that
lead to a positive experience, or reward, such as locating a
source of food or water. In contrast, we may be wired to forget
events that lead to a negative experience.
-Copyright © 2005 Memory Loss and the Brain
Further Reading
“Noradrenergic
modulation of emotion-induced forgetting and
remembering,”
by Rene Hurlemann and others. (The Journal of Neuroscience,
,July 6, 2005, Vol. 25, No. 27, pp. 6343-6349.) |
