Transcript No Slide Title

EMOTION, AROUSAL AND
MEMORY
• Why emotion and memory?
– motivational foundations of cognition
– Neurologic links of memory and
emotion
– Claims about emotion and memory
• Flashbulb memories
• Intrusion of memories for traumatic
events
• Repression of memories for traumatic
events?
• Cortical regions involved in
emotional cognition
– Limbic system
• Amygdala and the Papez Circuit
– Medial frontal cortex
• Phineas Gage syndrome
– fMRI activation
• recent work at UF
A TWO-FACTOR APPROACH TO
EMOTION
• Emotion as motivational “action
dispositions” (Lang et al.)
– Approach and avoidance
= valence (pleasant / unpleasant)
– Intensity
= arousal (calm / aroused)
• Norming the “emotional space” of
stimuli
butter
person
pretty
history
hero
cancer
Pleasant
Calm
Aroused
unpleasant
• How emotion could affect memory
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Attentional focus and intensity
Encoding depth and elaboration
Degree of rehearsal and review
Rate or extent of “consolidation”
Affect as retrieval cue
Inhibitory effect of stress?
• Memory for emotional life events
– Emotional public events
– Traumatic personal experiences
– Are unpleasant events ever less
memorable?
• Potential for selective rehearsal
• The Pollyanna effect
• Amnesia for highly traumatic events:
Fugues and dissociative amnesia
Main Findings of Research on
Emotion and Memory
• Arousal, more than valence, matters
– For lab and life, pleasant and
unpleasant events remembered better
than neutral events
– Differences for memory of pleasant &
unpleasant events very domain-specific
• Emotional arousal can act directly
as well as indirectly
AMYG
HIPPOCAMPUS
Release of stress
Hormones
(cortisol, adrenaline)
Systemic
arousal
EMOTION AND MEMORY
IN THE LAB
• Ebbinghaus (1885): emotional
materials “more memorable”
• Levinger & Clark (1961)
– 30 neutral, 30 unpleasant words
– Ss generate associates to each
– Immediate recall of associates, given
words, slower & less accurate for
unpleasant words
– So: repression of unpleasant events?
• Bradley & Morris (1976)
– Add pleasant words, delayed recall
– Immediate recall worse for emotional
words
– Delayed recall better for emotional
words
– So, in LTM at least, a very typical
“arousal” effect, with emotional words
better remembered
ERP’S AND EMOTIONAL WORDS
• ERPs to emotional words
– emotional words show an enhanced
positivity c. 300-600 msec post-onset
(e.g., Fischler et al.)
CZ
– Effect is lost when looking only at
words subsequently not recalled
CZ
• The “attentional narrowing”
hypothesis (Easterbook 1959: Cue
Utilization)
– Some evidence that stress narrows the
“scope” of the spotlight
– The “weapon focus” hypothesis
(Christianson, 1990)
Heuer & Reisberg (1990): emotion and
“detail memory”
arousing slide show
(visit surgeon father, gory pics)
neutral slide show
(visit auto mechanic father)
unexpected recall two weeks later:
20
15
Arousing
Arousing
Neutral
Neutral
15
Mean Recall
Mean Recall
12
9
6
10
5
3
0
0
Central
Peripheral
Centrality to story
Plot
Character
Type of intrusion error
The “Papez circuit”
The “Limbic” System