Older news items (pre-2010) brought over from the old website
How emotion affects memory (general)
Mixed feelings not remembered as well as happy or sad ones
A series of studies that tested participants' emotions when they faced scenarios such as taking tests and moving, events that are typically associated with mixed emotions, has found that the intensity of mixed emotions tends to be underestimated when recalling the experience. This underestimation increases over time, to the point that people sometimes don't remember having felt ambivalent at all. This is more likely among those who are uncomfortable feeling mixed emotions. Interestingly, Asian Americans in the study did not exhibit the same degree of memory decline for mixed emotions as Anglo-Americans did.
Aaker, J., Drolet, A. & Griffin, D. 2008. Recalling Mixed Emotions. Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (2), 268-278.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/uocp-mfn062508.php
Emotions help memory, at the cost of other memories
Do we remember emotionally charged events better? Maybe — but at a price. A new study presented volunteers with lists of neutral words with one disturbing noun, such as murder or scream, embedded. As expected, the emotional words were much better remembered than the neutral words. More interestingly, the poorest memory occurred for neutral words that were presented immediately before the disturbing words. The effect was greater for women — women forgot those words twice as often as men.
[214] Strange, B. A., Hurlemann R., & Dolan R. J.
(2003). An emotion-induced retrograde amnesia in humans is amygdala- and beta-adrenergic-dependent.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 100(23), 13626 - 13631.
http://www.sciencenews.org/20031108/fob5.asp
How memory helps make life pleasant
Surveys consistently show that people are generally happy with their lives. A review of research into autobiographical memory suggests why - human memory is biased toward happiness. Across 12 studies conducted by five different research teams, people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds and of different ages consistently reported experiencing more positive events in their lives than negative events, suggesting that pleasant events do in fact outnumber unpleasant events because people seek out positive experiences and avoid negative ones. Our memory also treats pleasant emotions differently from unpleasant emotions. Pleasant emotions appear to fade more slowly from our memory than unpleasant emotions. This is not repression; people do remember negative events, they just remember them less negatively. Among those with mild depression, however, unpleasant and pleasant emotions tend to fade evenly.
Walker, W.R., Skowronski, J.J. & Thompson, C.P. 2003. Life Is Pleasant -- and Memory Helps to Keep It That Way! Review of General Psychology, 7(2),203-10.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/apa-rtg060203.php
Suppressing your expression of emotion affects your memory for the event
The way people go about controlling their reactions to emotional events affects their memory of the event. In a series of experiments designed to assess the effect of suppressing the expression of emotion, it was found that, when people were shown a video of an emotional event and instructed not to let their emotions show, they had poorer memory for what was said and done than did those people who were given no such instructions. However, when shown slides of people who had been injured, people in both groups were equally good at picking which in an array of subtly different versions of each slide had been shown earlier - but when prompted to recall information that had been presented verbally with each slide, those in the suppression group again remembered fewer details. People who were asked to adopt the neutral attitude of a medical profession however, performed better than the control group on nonverbal recall, indicating the regulation of emotions via reappraisal was not associated with any memory impairment. These experimental results were supported by a naturalistic study.
[607] Richards, J. M., & Gross J. J.
(2000). Emotion regulation and memory: The cognitive costs of keeping one's cool..
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 79(3), 410 - 424.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/09/000913203335.htm
Mood
When mood affects memory
The effect of mood on memory depends on what questions are asked; only some aspects of memory are affected by incidental mood. For example, your memory of a restaurant's food won't be affected by the mood you were in when you ate it, but your memory of how much you enjoyed it will be. A new study shows that the effects of mood also depend on whether you had thought about that aspect during the experience — whether you had thought about how enjoyable the experience was at the time. In the study, people were shown a painting. Half of them were first put in a negative mood by reading and answering questions about an unpleasant subject. After looking at the painting, half were asked what they thought of it. Five days later, the participants were all asked how much they had liked the painting. While being in a negative mood had affected those who had evaluated the painting at the time, it did not affect those who had not made an evaluation at the time of presentation.
Pocheptsova, A. & Novemsky, N. 2009. When Do Incidental Mood Effects Last? Lay Beliefs versus Actual Effects. Journal of Consumer Research, Published online September 10, 2009
http://www.physorg.com/news172767544.html
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-09/uocp-mmn092109.php
Perception affected by mood
An imaging study has revealed that when people were shown a composite image with a face surrounded by "place" images, such as a house, and asked to identify the gender of the face, those in whom a bad mood had been induced didn’t process the places in the background. However, those in a good mood took in both the focal and background images. These differences in perception were coupled with differences in activity in the parahippocampal place area. Increasing the amount of information is of course not necessarily a good thing, as it may result in more distraction.
[1054] Schmitz, T. W., De Rosa E., & Anderson A. K.
(2009). Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding.
J. Neurosci.. 29(22), 7199 - 7207.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/uot-pww060309.php
Positive mood may not help in tasks requiring attention to detail
A series of experiments with different child age groups who had happy or sad moods induced with the aid of music and selected video clips before then being asked to undertake a task that required attention to detail has found that the children induced to feel a sad or neutral mood performed the task better than those induced to feel happy. Other research has found that a positive mood is beneficial in other situations, such as when a task calls for creative thinking.
[854] Schnall, S. [1], Jaswal V. K. [2], & Rowe C. [1]
(2008). A hidden cost of happiness in children.
Developmental Science. 11, F25-F30 - F25-F30.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/uov-ssc053008.php
A study of 55 healthy adults has found that those who had high levels of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids had more gray matter in areas of the brain associated with emotional arousal and regulation — the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex, the right amygdala and the right hippocampus. Although this doesn’t mean omega-3 necessarily causes such changes, the finding does support a recent study that found higher levels of omega-3 were associated with a more positive outlook, and animal studies showing that increasing omega-3 intake leads to structural changes in the brain. Good sources of omega-3 fatty acids are walnuts, flax, and fatty fish such as salmon and sardines.
The findings were presented March 7 at the American Psychosomatic Society's Annual Meeting, in Budapest, Hungary.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070307080827.htm
http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20070307/omega-3-fatty-acids-may-boost-brain
Insight into the processes of 'positive' and 'negative' learners
An intriguing study of the electrical signals emanating from the brain has revealed two types of learners. A brainwave event called an "event-related potential" (ERP) is important in learning; a particular type of ERP called "error-related negativity" (ERN), is associated with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. This region is activated during demanding cognitive tasks, and ERNs are typically more negative after participants make incorrect responses compared to correct choices. Unexpectedly, studies of this ERN found a difference between "positive" learners, who perform better at choosing the correct response than avoiding the wrong one, and "negative" learners, who learn better to avoid incorrect responses. The negative learners showed larger ERNs, suggesting that "these individuals are more affected by, and therefore learn more from, their errors.” Positive learners had larger ERNs when faced with high-conflict win/win decisions among two good options than during lose/lose decisions among two bad options, whereas negative learners showed the opposite pattern.
[818] Frank, M. J., Woroch B. S., & Curran T.
(2005). Error-Related Negativity Predicts Reinforcement Learning and Conflict Biases.
Neuron. 47(4), 495 - 501.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-08/cp-iit081205.php
Positive emotions help people see big picture details
A study involving 89 students, who watched a video designed to induce either joy and laughter, anxiety, or no emotion, found that those who were in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members of another race when briefly shown photos of individuals. In the absence of positive emotions, subjects recognized members of their own race 75% of the time but only recognized members of another race 65% of the time. Their ability to recognize members of their own race was unaffected by their emotional state.
[2551] Johnson, K. J., & Fredrickson B. L.
(2005). “We All Look the Same to Me”.
Psychological Science. 16(11), 875 - 881.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-02/uom-pes020105.php
Mood affects eyewitness accuracy and reasoning
A new study suggests people in a negative mood provide more accurate eyewitness accounts than people in a positive mood state. Moreover, people in a positive mood showed poorer judgment and critical thinking skills than those in a negative mood. The researchers suggest that a negative mood state triggers more systematic and attentive, information processing, while good moods signal a benign, non-threatening environment where we don't need to be so vigilant.
[2550] Forgas, J. P., Laham S. M., & Vargas P. T.
(2005). Mood effects on eyewitness memory: Affective influences on susceptibility to misinformation.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 41(6), 574 - 588.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/uons-era082004.php
Excitement helps memory for unrelated events
We’ve long known that emotionally charged events are easier to remember than boring ones. New research suggests that the reason is the flood of emotion, not the personal meaningfulness of the event. Subjects asked to memorize a list of words did better if they subsequently watched a gory film of a bloody dental extraction, rather than a dull video on tooth brushing.
Nielson, K.A., Yee, D. & Erickson, K.I. 2002. Modulation of memory storage processes by post-training emotional arousal from a semantically unrelated source. Paper presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, 4 November.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/021104/021104-5.html
Mood needs to be matched to cognitive task for best performance
An imaging study looked at the brain activity of 14 college-aged men and women as they performed difficult cognitive tasks requiring the active retention of information in working memory, after watching short, emotional videos, designed to elicit one of three emotional states: pleasant, neutral or anxious. It was found that mild anxiety improved performance on some tasks, but hurt performance on others. Being in a pleasant mood boosted some kinds of performance but impaired other kinds. A region of the prefrontal cortex was jointly influenced by a combination of mood state and cognitive task, but not by either one alone.
[227] Gray, J. R., Braver T. S., & Raichle M. E.
(2002). Integration of emotion and cognition in the lateral prefrontal cortex.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 99(6), 4115 - 4120.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-03/wuis-mlt031802.php
Brain study shows how surprises help us learn
Because they are hard to forget, surprises can help us learn. Now scientists have identified a part of the brain that may be involved in learning from surprises. A team led by Dr. Paul C. Fletcher at the University of Cambridge monitored the brain activity in a group of volunteers who were participating in a simulation exercise. The participants pretended to work at drug companies and were asked to predict whether a particular fictitious drug would trigger a particular fictitious syndrome. In the early phase of the study, when the participants were not familiar with the effects of the various drugs, imaging tests detected high levels of activity in this part of the brain. As the volunteers became familiar with the effects of the drugs, so that they were no longer surprised by the results, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex declined, but later in the study, this region became more active when the participants were surprised by unexpected responses.
[1329] Fletcher, P. C., Anderson J. M., Shanks D. R., Honey R., Carpenter T. A., Donovan T., et al.
(2001). Responses of human frontal cortex to surprising events are predicted by formal associative learning theory.
Nat Neurosci. 4(10), 1043 - 1048.
Motivation & attitude
Confidence as important as IQ in exam success
I’ve talked repeatedly about the effects of self-belief on memory and cognition. One important area in which this is true is that of academic achievement. Evidence indicates that your perceived abilities matter, just as much? more than? your actual abilities. It has been assumed that self perceived abilities, self-confidence if you will, is a product mainly of nurture. Now a new twin study provides evidence that nurture / environment may only provide half the story; the other half may lie in the genes. The study involved 1966 pairs of identical twins and 1877 pairs of fraternal twins. The next step is to tease out which of these genes are related to IQ and which to personality variables.
[1080] Greven, C. U., Harlaar N., Kovas Y., Chamorro-Premuzic T., & Plomin R.
(2009). More Than Just IQ: School Achievement Is Predicted by Self-Perceived Abilities—But for Genetic Rather Than Environmental Reasons.
Psychological Science. 20(6), 753 - 762.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17187-confidence-as-important-as-iq-in-exam-success.html
Anticipation strengthens memory
An imaging study has revealed that the amygdala and the hippocampus become activated when a person is anticipating a difficult situation (some type of gruesome picture). Moreover, the higher the level of activation during this anticipation, the better the pictures were remembered two weeks later. The study demonstrates how expectancy can affect long-term memory formation, and suggests that the greater our anxiety about a situation, the better we’ll remember that situation. If it’s an unpleasant one, this will only reinforce the anxiety, setting up a vicious cycle. The study has important implications for the treatment of psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and social anxiety.
[354] Mackiewicz, K. L., Sarinopoulos I., Cleven K. L., & Nitschke J. B.
(2006). The effect of anticipation and the specificity of sex differences for amygdala and hippocampus function in emotional memory.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 103(38), 14200 - 14205.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-09/uow-apa090106.php
Why motivation helps memory
An imaging study has identified the brain region involved in anticipating rewards — specific brain structures in the mesolimbic region involved in the processing of emotions — and revealed how this reward center promotes memory formation. Cues to high-reward scenes that were later remembered activated the reward areas of the mesolimbic region as well as the hippocampus. Anticipatory activation also suggests that the brain actually prepares in advance to filter incoming information rather than simply reacting to the world.
[1254] Adcock, A. R., Thangavel A., Whitfield-Gabrieli S., Knutson B., & Gabrieli J. D. E.
(2006). Reward-Motivated Learning: Mesolimbic Activation Precedes Memory Formation.
Neuron. 50(3), 507 - 517.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-05/cp-tbm042706.php
Different brain regions for arousing and non-arousing words
An imaging study has found that words representing arousing events (e.g., “rape”, “slaughter”) activate cells in the amygdala, while nonarousing words (e.g., “sorrow”, “mourning”) activated cells in the prefrontal cortex. The hippocampus was active for both type of words. On average, people remembered more of the arousing words than the others, suggesting stress hormones, released as part of the response to emotionally arousing events, are responsible for enhancing memories of those events.
Kensinger, E.A. & Corkin, S. 2004. Two routes to emotional memory: Distinct neural processes for valence and arousal. PNAS, 101, 3310-3315. Published online before print February 23 2004, 10.1073/pnas.0306408101
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/miot-mlu030104.php
Gender & age effects
When emotions involved, older adults may perform memory tasks better than young adults
A study involving 72 young adults (20-30 years old) and 72 older adults (60-75) has found that regulating emotions – such as reducing negative emotions or inhibiting unwanted thoughts – is a resource-demanding process that disrupts the ability of young adults to simultaneously or subsequently perform tasks, but doesn’t affect older adults. In the study, most of the participants watched a two-minute video designed to induce disgust, while the rest watched a neutral two-minute clip. Participants then played a computer memory game. Before playing 2 further memory games, those who had watched the disgusting video were instructed either to change their negative reaction into positive feelings as quickly as possible or to maintain the intensity of their negative reaction, or given no instructions. Those young adults who had been told to turn their disgust into positive feelings, performed significantly worse on the subsequent memory tasks, but older adults were not affected. The feelings of disgust in themselves did not affect performance in either group. It’s speculated that older adults’ greater experience allows them to regulate their emotions without cognitive effort.
[200] Scheibe, S., & Blanchard-Fields F.
(2009). Effects of regulating emotions on cognitive performance: what is costly for young adults is not so costly for older adults.
Psychology and Aging. 24(1), 217 - 223.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-03/giot-oac030409.php
Aging brains allow negative memories to fade
Another study has found that older adults (average age 70) remember fewer negative images than younger adults (average age 24), and that this has to do with differences in brain activity. When shown negative images, the older participants had reduced interactions between the amygdala and the hippocampus, and increased interactions between the amygdala and the dorsolateral frontal cortex. It seems that the older participants were using thinking rather than feeling processes to store these emotional memories, sacrificing information for emotional stability. The findings are consistent with earlier research showing that healthy seniors are able to regulate emotion better than younger people.
[680] St Jacques, P. L., Dolcos F., & Cabeza R.
(2009). Effects of aging on functional connectivity of the amygdala for subsequent memory of negative pictures: a network analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data.
Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. 20(1), 74 - 84.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/uoaf-aba121608.php
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/dumc-oay121508.php
Emotions help memory, at the cost of other memories
Do we remember emotionally charged events better? Maybe — but at a price. A new study presented volunteers with lists of neutral words with one disturbing noun, such as murder or scream, embedded. As expected, the emotional words were much better remembered than the neutral words. More interestingly, the poorest memory occurred for neutral words that were presented immediately before the disturbing words. The effect was greater for women — women forgot those words twice as often as men.
[214] Strange, B. A., Hurlemann R., & Dolan R. J.
(2003). An emotion-induced retrograde amnesia in humans is amygdala- and beta-adrenergic-dependent.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 100(23), 13626 - 13631.
http://www.sciencenews.org/20031108/fob5.asp
Why women better remember emotional memories
A new brain imaging study reveals gender differences in the encoding of emotional memories. We have long known that women are better at remembering emotional memories, now we can see that the sexes tend to encode emotional experiences in different parts of the brain. In women, it seems that evaluation of emotional experience and encoding of the memory is much more tightly integrated.
[807] Canli, T., Desmond J. E., Zhao Z., & Gabrieli J. D. E.
(2002). Sex differences in the neural basis of emotional memories.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 99(16), 10789 - 10794.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992576
Older adults better at forgetting negative images
It seems that this general tendency, to remember the good, and let the bad fade, gets stronger as we age. Following recent research suggesting that older people tend to regulate their emotions more effectively than younger people, by maintaining positive feelings and lowering negative feelings, researchers examined age differences in recall of positive, negative and neutral images of people, animals, nature scenes and inanimate objects. The first study tested 144 participants aged 18-29, 41-53 and 65-80. Older adults recalled fewer negative images relative to positive and neutral images. For the older adults, recognition memory also decreased for negative pictures. As a result, the younger adults remembered the negative pictures better. Preliminary brain research suggests that in older adults, the amygdala is activated equally to positive and negative images, whereas in younger adults, it is activated more to negative images. This suggests that older adults encode less information about negative images, which in turn would diminish recall.
[343] Charles, S T., Mather M., & Carstensen L. L.
(2003). Aging and Emotional Memory: The Forgettable Nature of Negative Images for Older Adults.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 132(2), 310 - 324.
http://www.apa.org/releases/aging_memory.html
Gender & race stereotypes
Neurology
Nasal spray boosts consolidation of emotional memory
A study in which 17 healthy young men were given a nasal spray of either interleukin-6 or a placebo after reading a short story (emotional on one occasion; neutral on the other) before going to bed, has found that those given the immune system molecule showed improved memory for emotional text (but not other kinds of material). Interleukin-6 is involved in inflammatory responses, but recently has also been implicated in memory consolidation during sleep. This finding supports that role, and demonstrates an interaction between the immune system and the central nervous system.
[811] Benedict, C., Scheller J., Rose-John S., Born J., & Marshall L.
(2009). Enhancing influence of intranasal interleukin-6 on slow-wave activity and memory consolidation during sleep.
FASEB J.. 23(10), 3629 - 3636.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091001091752.htm
Sleep selectively preserves emotional memories
It’s now generally accepted that sleep plays an important role in consolidating procedural (skill) memories, but the position regarding other types of memory has been less clear. A new study has found that sleep had an effect on emotional aspects of a memory. The study involved showing 88 students neutral scenes (such as a car parked on a street in front of shops) or negative scenes (a badly crashed car parked on a similar street). They were then tested for their memories of both the central objects in the pictures and the backgrounds in the scenes, either after 12 daytime hours, or 12 night-time hours, or 30 minutes after viewing the images, in either the morning or evening. Those tested after 12 daytime hours largely forgot the entire negative scene, forgetting both the central objects and the backgrounds equally. But those tested after a night’s sleep remembered the emotional item (e.g., the smashed car) as well as those who were tested only 30 minutes later. Their memory of the neutral background was however, as bad as the daytime group. The findings are consistent with the view that the individual components of emotional memory become 'unbound' during sleep, enabling the brain to selectively preserve only that information it considers important.
[875] Payne, J. D., Stickgold R., Swanberg K., & Kensinger E. A.
(2008). Sleep preferentially enhances memory for emotional components of scenes.
Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. 19(8), 781 - 788.
http://www.physorg.com/news137908693.html
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-08/bidm-sft081308.php
Why emotion enhances memory
We know that emotion can increase the memorability of events, but we haven’t known exactly why it does so. Now a new study reveals that during emotional arousal, the stress hormone norepinephrine makes synapses dramatically more sensitive by increasing the number of GluR1 receptors.
[423] Hu, H., Real E., Takamiya K., Kang M-G., Ledoux J., Huganir R. L., et al.
(2007). Emotion Enhances Learning via Norepinephrine Regulation of AMPA-Receptor Trafficking.
Cell. 131(1), 160 - 173.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-10/jhmi-wem100407.php
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-10/cp-hec100107.php
http://www.brainatlas.org/aba/2007/071018/full/aba1787.shtml
How emotions interfere with memory
We know emotion can interfere with cognitive processes. Now an imaging study adds to our understanding of how that occurs. Emotional images evoked strong activity in typical emotional processing regions (amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) while simultaneously deactivating regions involved in memory processing (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and lateral parietal cortex). The researchers also found individual differences among the subjects in their response to the images. People who showed greater activity in a brain region associated with the inhibition of response to emotional stimuli rated the emotional distracters as less distracting.
[270] Dolcos, F., & McCarthy G.
(2006). Brain Systems Mediating Cognitive Interference by Emotional Distraction.
J. Neurosci.. 26(7), 2072 - 2079.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-02/dumc-he021506.php
Different aspects of attention located in different parts of the brain
We all know attention is important, but we’ve never been sure exactly what it is. Recent research suggests there’s good reason for this – attention appears to be multi-faceted, far less simple than originally conceived. Patients with specific lesions in the frontal lobes and other parts of the brain have provided evidence that different types of attentional problems are associated with injuries in different parts of the brain, suggesting that attention is not, as has been thought, a global process. The researchers have found evidence for at least three distinct processes, each located in different parts of the frontal lobes. These are: (1) a system that helps us maintain a general state of readiness to respond, in the superior medial frontal regions; (2) a system that sets our threshold for responding to an external stimulus, in the left dorsolateral region; and (3) a system that helps us selectively attend to appropriate stimuli, in the right dorsolateral region.
[260] Stuss, D. T., Binns M. A., Murphy K. J., & Alexander M. P.
(2002). Dissociations within the anterior attentional system: effects of task complexity and irrelevant information on reaction time speed and accuracy.
Neuropsychology. 16(4), 500 - 513.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-10/apa-pda100702.php
How emotions interfere with staying focused
In a new imaging study, Duke University researchers have shown how emotional stimuli and "attentional functions" like driving move in parallel streams through the brain before being integrated in a specific part of the brain's prefrontal cortex (the anterior cingulate, which is located between the right and left halves). Emotional stimuli are thus more likely than simple distractions to interfere with a person's efforts to focus on a task such as driving. These findings may help us understand the neural dynamics underlying emotional distractibility on attentional tasks in affective disorders.
[835] Yamasaki, H., LaBar K. S., & McCarthy G.
(2002). Dissociable prefrontal brain systems for attention and emotion.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 99(17), 11447 - 11451.
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.182176499
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/99/17/11447
Cerebellum implicated in remembering emotions
The part of the brain known as the cerebellum has been most closely associated with motor coordination skills. Experiments with rats suggest that it may also be involved in remembering strong emotions, in particular, in the consolidation of long-term memories of fear.
[763] Sacchetti, B., Baldi E., Lorenzini C A., & Bucherelli C.
(2002). Cerebellar role in fear-conditioning consolidation.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 99(12), 8406 - 8411.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/112660399v1
http://news.bmn.com/jscan/biology?uid=18768
Amygdala may be critical for allowing perception of emotionally significant events despite inattention
We choose what to pay attention to, what to remember. We give more weight to some things than others. Our perceptions and memories of events are influenced by our preconceptions, and by our moods. Researchers at Yale and New York University have recently published research indicating that the part of the brain known as the amygdala is responsible for the influence of emotion on perception. This builds on previous research showing that the amygdala is critically involved in computing the emotional significance of events. The amygdala is connected to those brain regions dealing with sensory experiences, and the theory that these connections allow the amygdala to influence early perceptual processing is supported by this research. Dr. Anderson suggests that “the amygdala appears to be critical for the emotional tuning of perceptual experience, allowing perception of emotionally significant events to occur despite inattention.”
[968] Anderson, A. K., & Phelps E. A.
(2001). Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events.
Nature. 411(6835), 305 - 309.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-05/NYU-Infr-1605101.php