Remembering the Details: Effects of Emotion

Nature Neuroscience, 2004

Studies examining memories of arousing 'real-life' events show that emotion heightens the feeling of remembering, without necessarily enhancing the objective accuracy of the memories. We measured brain activity associated with the feeling of remembering emotional and neutral photos. Subjects indicated whether recognition was accompanied by a recollection of details about the study episode ('remember') or not ('know'). 'Remember' judgments were boosted for emotional photos, but accuracy did not differ. For neutral photos, 'remember' judgments were related to enhanced activity in the parahippocampal cortex, previously related to recognition of visual details, which one might expect to supply the retrieval clues for a 'remember' judgment. In contrast, 'remember' judgments for emotional photos were associated with enhanced activity in the amygdala, suggesting that subjects rely on arousal and perceptual fluency to evaluate these memories. For the first time, we identify the neural mechanisms underlying the enhanced feeling of remembering for emotional events.

Psychophysiology, 2009

This study examined how valence and arousal affect the processes linked to subsequent memory for emotional information. While undergoing an fMRI scan, participants viewed neutral pictures and emotional pictures varying by valence and arousal. After the scan, participants performed a recognition test. Subsequent memory for negative or high arousal information was associated with occipital and temporal activity, while memory for positive or low arousal information was associated with frontal activity. Regression analyses confirmed that for negative or high arousal items, temporal lobe activity was the strongest predictor of later memory whereas for positive or low arousal items, frontal activity corresponded most strongly with later memory. These results suggest that the types of encoding processes relating to memory (e.g., sensory vs. elaborative processing) can differ based on the affective qualities of emotional information.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2004

Prior investigations have demonstrated that emotional information is often better remembered than neutral information, but they have not directly contrasted effects attributable to valence and those attributable to arousal. By using functional MRI and behavioral studies, we found that distinct cognitive and neural processes contribute to emotional memory enhancement for arousing information versus valenced, nonarousing information. The former depended on an amygdalar-hippocampal network, whereas the latter was supported by a prefrontal cortex-hippocampal network implicated in controlled encoding processes. A behavioral companion study, with a divided-attention paradigm, confirmed that memory enhancement for valenced, nonarousing words relied on controlled encoding processes: concurrent task performance reduced the enhancement effect. Enhancement for arousing words occurred automatically, even when encoding resources were diverted to the secondary task. W hy do we remember some experiences while forgetting others? Neuroimaging has provided a tool to probe this question. By comparing the neural activity during encoding of items that are later remembered versus those that are later forgotten (a ''subsequent memory'' analysis), one can examine the processes mediating successful encoding (i.e., that are carried out during encoding of words that will later be remembered; reviewed in ref. 1). Functional MRI studies have indicated that activation in prefrontal cortex (PFC), hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus underlies successful encoding, such that greater activation in these regions increases the probability that information will be remembered.

Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 2011

Emotion strengthens the subjective experience of recollection. However, these vivid and confidently remembered emotional memories may not necessarily be more accurate. We investigated whether the subjective sense of recollection for negative stimuli is coupled with enhanced memory accuracy for contextual details using the remember/know paradigm. Our results indicate a double-dissociation between the subjective feeling of remembering, and the objective memory accuracy for details of negative and neutral scenes. "Remember" judgments were boosted for negative relative to neutral scenes. In contrast, memory for contextual details and associative binding was worse for negative compared to neutral scenes given a "remember" response. These findings show that the enhanced subjective recollective experience for negative stimuli does not reliably indicate greater objective recollection, at least of the details tested, and thus may be driven by a different mechanism than th...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2006

Emotional events are bestowed with special prominence in memory. This may reflect greater attention oriented to these events during encoding, and͞or enhancement of memory consolidation after emotional events have passed. Here we show invoked emotional arousal results in a retrograde enhancement of long-term memory, determining what will later be remembered or forgotten. Subjects saw pictures of neutral faces and houses followed by emotionally arousing scenes at varying intervals. Self-reported emotional arousal responses predicted a retrograde enhancement of memory for preceding neutral events in a 1-week delayed recognition memory test. At longer picture-scene intervals, no enhancement was found, implicating a critical window in which emotional arousal must occur for retrograde memory enhancement. Postencoding manipulation of emotional arousal specifically enhanced conscious recollection rather than familiarity-based discrimination. An additional study revealed no retrograde enhancement for pictures preceding highly memorable, but nonarousing, distinctive scenes. These findings indicate an important role for emotional arousal in the postencoding enhancement of episodic memory consolidation.