Emotions And Memory

Many people remember extremely emotional experiences indelibly in their brains. The region of the brain that stores emotion is called the amygdala. The amygdala works together with the main memory storage area of the brain, the hippocampus. These two locations in the brain create a memory-loop connection that helps a person recall a specific emotionally charged memory. The novel (first-time) or shocking events that imprint and encode the information in the memory are often very detailed and can be remembered quickly and long-term. This is not to say the stored information is always accurate.

Memories are subjective, that is to say, the person remembering the event is not recalling a wholly nonobjective recording of the past event, he or she is not processing literal recordings. Emotional stress of an event can cloud a person's recalling of the experience or render it extraordinarily persistent. In some cases, when a person has been through a particularly negative event, the memory will sometimes erase the details of this event, perhaps protecting the person from reliving the experience through highly emotional memories. Memories are not unaffected by the passage of time which weakens and decays the intensity of the event being remembered. Strong emotions have the ability to distort and decay memory. A very emotional situation involving intense fear can impair a person's ability to remember what happened.

To examine the effects of emotional memory in specific brain regions, neuroscientists from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia have conducted a study where picture cards are shown to a group of healthy people depicting images. Some images were emotionally disturbing or pleasant (bloody body parts, war victims, sexually provocative or delicious food), some were neutral (people shopping, a room in a house) and other images that were thought to be 'interesting' but unemotional (a picture of an exotic street festival). The subjects' brains were scanned for areas of activity when viewing the images with positron emission tomography (PET) scans. The study found that the emotional scenes elicited the most activity levels in the amygdala. When the scientists interviewed the subjects four weeks later, the subjects' memories of the emotional and interesting scenes were substantially higher than those of the neutral images.

The memory recollection was equally powerful among the pleasant and unpleasant images. The amygdala is the brain's emotional computer that works together with the hippocampus to preserve memories of highly emotional states. In the study, the PET signals where the activity was high in the amygdala were also high in the hippocampus, proving that emotion and memory are linked. Dr. Roberto Cabeza of the study suggests, "We speculate that the regions that were more activated for emotional stimuli are involved in semantic processing of the meaning of the images, whereas those that are more activated by neutral stimuli reflect perceptual processing."

This basic study brings attention to the correlation between emotion and memory that could aid scientists in understanding the brain functionality in cases of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. People who suffer from depression and dwell obsessively on negative emotional experiences or events could reflect pathology in how the neural transmissions in the brain's memory systems are functioning.

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