Emotional Memory: What Is It And What Is Its Biological Basis?
Memories do not focus only on the events that occurred, but also in the physiological responses that occurred simultaneously; In fact, the emotional intensity and relevance of a situation seem to be the key factors that explain whether its imprint is maintained in the long term.
Sometimes the emotional memory of an event may even continue to exist after the facts have been forgotten; This usually happens in cases of phobia, in which we do not always remember what the traumatic experience was that caused the fear to appear.
In this article we will describe What is emotional memory and what are its biological bases? in addition to defining the nature and influence mechanisms of the relationships between memory and emotions.
In the field of Psychology we can define emotional memory as learning, storage and the memory of events associated with physiological responses that occurred at the time when said events took place. It is also related to the recovery of other information and details associated with the specific event.
However, it is a very broad concept whose use varies depending on the context; For example, the famous theater pedagogue Konstantin Stanislavski called “affective memory” a performance technique consisting of remembering events to evoke certain emotions.
Emotional memory is one of the nuclear aspects of human identity: our most vivid autobiographical memories They are usually associated with very intense emotions, whether positive or negative. It has been suggested that we remember the physiological state we were in at a given moment more than the events themselves.
From the evolutionary perspective, it is argued that emotional memory developed because it increased our ability to adapt to the environment, allowing us to react quickly to situations that could pose a danger to survival. In fact, emotions can be understood as the foundations of motivation, what predisposes us to want to achieve certain goals and avoid certain experiences.
In this sense, emotional memory is what gives meaning to the emotions themselves, given that allows our behavior to be articulated according to what we are learning about the consequences of our actions and our way of exposing ourselves to certain environments or situations. Without emotional memory, we would hardly have references about what to do, especially if we take into account that in our species behavior depends much more on what we learn than on our instincts.
The relationship between emotions and memory
Memory and emotion are closely related processes; all stages of memory, from information encoding to long-term retrieval, are facilitated by emotional factors. This influence is bidirectional, so that memories frequently trigger the appearance of emotions, for example.
Emotion has modulating effects on both declarative or explicit memory and non-declarative or implicit memory. What makes us remember an event better or worse is not so much its relevance in personal history as the intensity of the emotions we experienced when that moment took place.
Factors that influence memory
In general, there are two emotional factors that affect memory: the degree of activation and valence of the emotion The emotional activation associated with a stimulus or situation focuses attention on it, so that it will be remembered better in the future, especially if our emotional state is similar to that of the learning context.
However, intense emotions can also interfere with other types of memory, specifically procedural and operational or working memory. This affects the consolidation of memories and is related to attention; For example, dissociative experiences that occur under intense stress make it difficult to consolidate information.
Within the framework of the psychology of emotions, the word “valence” is used to designate positive or negative quality. In general Memories associated with pleasant emotions are better remembered and with more details than the negative ones, especially as measured at advanced ages.
A phenomenon related to emotional valence is that of state dependence, proposed by Bower. State dependence consists of the fact that we more easily remember emotionally positive events if we are happy and more negative experiences if we feel sad.
Biological bases of emotional memory
The brain structure known as the amygdala It has a fundamental role in emotional memory. In addition to allowing the learning of the association between situations and emotions, the amygdala sends signals that facilitate memory-related operations in other areas of the brain, especially the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.
Its central role is classical conditioning learning of emotional responses, by which we associate a stimulus with the emotions we feel while it is present, as happens in phobias. Amygdala activity has been primarily linked to negative emotions, and more specifically to fear.
Although more research is required on this topic, it is known that stress hormones, such as cortisol, interact with the amygdala. These effects can be facilitatory, but also inhibitory: for example, when we feel anxiety, the consolidation of memories worsens because working memory is partially occupied by stress.
Functions of the frontotemporal regions of the brain as a whole include facilitating the retention, storage, and retrieval of emotionally charged memories; In turn, feelings of emotional activation promote long-term memory of these events.
