Positive emotional impacts favor the memory of future future events

All psychological processes are related to each other, this includes memory and emotions. For years, scientists know that people better remember things that had some emotional impact. This is the reason why traumatic experiences are often remembered vividly. Now, a new study indicates that positive emotional impacts favor the memory of future future events.

According to research, when some information is linked to pleasant emotions, it is easier to remember identical or similar information. Next, we will know more details about this essay and its implications in everyday life.

Content

• Memory and emotions
• Positive emotional impacts favor memory
• The role of sleep
• Implications of the study
  • References

Memory and emotions

In simple terms, memory is the psychological process that allows us to store, organize and recover past information. Every day we use this capacity such as when we look for an object that we keep or remember the name of someone. Memory also helps us avoid situations that can be dangerous or unpleasant because we have memories about similar experiences.

Following this line, we also know that emotions have a great impact on our memory. For example, it is easy to remember the lyrics of our favorite song because it is associated with deep feelings. Similarly, when someone has a traumatic experience, they are likely to remember the situation in great detail due to the intense fear he felt.

In this sense, a team of researchers from the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute published a job where they deepen this topic. While we know that emotions influence the fixation of information that is present at the time, there is another question: do they have any role in future memories? With this question, Javiera Oyarzún, the main author and her team, developed an interesting essay.

Positive emotional impacts favor memory

In order to demonstrate whether positive emotional impacts favor the memory of similar events in the future, they designed a study with volunteers. Study participants were shown images belonging to two categories: animals and objects. In this case, the authors offered rewards every time the image of an animal appeared.

Then, they proceeded to check which images were able to remember better. As expected, the ones that were best remembered were those that associated with some prize. But, this was not what the team wanted to verify. For the second phase of the study, they returned to present images of the same categories, but now there was no reward.

Then, they performed the same memories tests to verify which images were best fixed in memory. They realized that the participants better remembered the images of animals than those of object, although they now did not obtain rewards. Therefore, they concluded that positive emotional impacts favor the memory of future future events.

In other words, if we experience pleasant emotions while we expose ourselves to some stimulus, we will remember better that information and other similar in the future. For example, if you congratulate and reward you for making a good presentation of biology, in the future you will remember more ease related things.

The role of sleep

Another interesting aspect about the study is that he also found that the dream has an important role in this phenomenon. The participants did not show the ability to remember neutral images similar to stimuli with emotional impact, until after 24 hours. This means that the dream favors the consolidation of the emotional footprint and improves the ability to remember similar information.

So, not only is enough for memories to be associated with some pleasant emotion. It is also necessary to have a healthy break so that memory is optimized.

Emotional memory What is it?

Implications of the study

Now, what implications does a study like this have in everyday life? JAviera Oryazún points out that this selective memory capacity can be used at the therapeutic level in patients with learning or memory difficulties. Thus, it would be possible to optimize the long -term memory of these people and increase their quality of life.

For example, in the educational field, patients with learning difficulties or memory have trouble meeting academic demands. If this ability to retain information is used, they may have less difficulties and a higher success rate. In turn, this could contribute to your self -esteem and emotional well -being.

On the other hand, this work helps us deepen the role that emotions play in the consolidation of memories. Again, we see that the emotional impact that has some experience in us is decisive to be able to remember it. For that reason, it is difficult to remember trivial things that lack emotional value, such as thinking about what breakfast we had a week ago.

Of course, this does not mean that only memories that are linked to emotions will be the ones we can remember. It is important to be clear that memory is a complex capacity where other factors such as repetition also intervene. The more times we expose ourselves to certain information, the easier it will be to remember it in the future.

If we return to the question about what we ate last week, we may remember if we have a specific diet. Or if we eat the same food on a specific day every week. There, the repetition would help the memory notice.

In conclusion, it is a fact that positive emotional impacts favor the memory of future future events. Hopefully other similar studies can clarify more about it.

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References

• Oyarzún, j. P., Packard, p. TO., Diego-Balaguer, R., & Fuentemilla, L. (2016). Motivated Enoding Selectively Promotes Memory for Future Incansential Semantically-Related Events. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 133, 1-6.