EMOTION, AROUSAL AND MEMORY

1. 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

2. 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 pretty hero person history cancer Pleasant unpleasant Calm Aroused

3. How emotion could affect memory • 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

4. 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 Systemic arousal Release of stress Hormones (cortisol, adrenaline)

5. EMOTION AND MEMORYIN 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

6. 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.) • Effect is lost when looking only at words subsequently not recalled

7. 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:

8. The “Papez circuit”

9. The “Limbic” System