Emotions improve memory for contextual details, study finds

Researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology have shown that emotion improves memory for contextual details, challenging the idea that emotion impairs the ability to remember such information.

The report was led by doctoral student Paul Bogdan, now a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University, and Florin and Sanda Dolcos, professors of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Their research appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

“The story of how emotions and memories interact is still developing,” Dolcos said. “We have demonstrated the circumstances under which it is possible to avoid forgetting contextual details, which not only disrupts the status quo at a theoretical level, but also has practical implications for what we can do to control, channel, and capitalize on the energy of emotions to remember better.”

In emotional situations, people often focus more on the main topic—the crashed car, the screaming stranger, the crying child—and less on peripheral information. In three interconnected studies, Beckman researchers linked behavioral, attentional, and brain imaging data to build a comprehensive picture of the impact of emotions and explain this involuntary shift in attention.

They found that emotion enhances the ability to retrieve contextual details.

In emotional situations that participants remembered accurately, functional magnetic resonance imaging data showed evidence of interaction between emotion-processing and memory-processing brain regions, which promoted recall of contextual details. This runs counter to the widespread view that emotions impair recall of these details by inhibiting memory-processing brain regions.

Additional studies used Beckman’s eye-tracking equipment and one of its three Tesla MRI scanners. One study used webcam eye-tracking, with participants participating remotely.

“Webcam eye tracking is an emerging technology, and this is the first study of emotional memory to go beyond simply validating its effectiveness,” Bogdan said.

Knowing the impact of emotions on memories and knowing how to manage them is an important step towards contextualizing memories, increasing well-being and alleviating clinical conditions such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is associated with memory decontextualization, which is a disconnect between the memory of a traumatic event and its context, causing the memory to be easily activated by unrelated triggers. The researchers hope their findings will contribute to the development of strategies to prevent decontextualization and promote recontextualization.

This study also has general applications for improving memory. This is especially important for older adults, as aging is often associated with a decline in memory for contextual details.

Developing strategies to actively focus attention on the whole of an image or situation, rather than just the main focal point, can help slow memory decline.

“The status quo is that emotion impairs memory for contextual details, but if our relational memory is always impaired when we’re in the middle of something stressful, then there’s not much we can do about it, and so the outlook is pretty bleak,” Dolcos said.

But this does not necessarily have to be the case.

“Having a memory-based mindset when we experience and retrieve something we want to remember is key to our memory success,” Dolcos said.