Emotional states can linger in the brain and enhance the memory formation of events many minutes later, suggests research published in Nature Neuroscience, even when the subsequent events are unrelated to the evoked emotion.
The study found that inducing an emotional state enhanced participants’ ability to recall neutral images 9 to 33 minutes later. The participants completed a memory test in which they either were shown a series of emotional images followed by a series of neutral images, or were shown a series of neutral images followed by a series of emotional images. During the experiment, some of the participants’ brain activity was monitored with an fMRI.
The researchers found that those exposed to the emotionally-arousing images first had greater levels of recollection for the neutral images.
PsyPost interviewed one of the study’s lead author, Arielle Tambini of the University of California, Berkeley. Read her responses below:
PsyPost: Why were you interested in this topic?
Tambini: The topic was interesting to us as it is a well-established finding that emotional experiences are associated with more vivid and detailed memories that are more robustly remembered over time compared to neutral experiences. Although the impact of emotion on memory and other cognition functions has been studied, less is known about whether emotion induces a lasting state in the brain, and whether this kind of lasting impact on brain function can influence subsequent experiences that would be otherwise neutral. Thus, in this study, we asked how a long block of exposure to emotion-inducing images influences brain activity when participants were exposed to neutral images tens of minutes later, and how memory for these neutral images is modified by the presence of prior emotion.
What should the average person take away from your study?
The basic take home message is that an emotionally arousing experience can not only influence your memory of the event itself, but that it induces a brain-state that lingers and can influence your subsequent experiences after the emotional event has passed. This may color your experience during events that occur after emotional arousal, making them more similar to an emotional event.
Are there any major caveats? What questions still need to be addressed?
This research opens up new questions for future research. For example, from our study, it is unclear what is required to induce a lasting emotional state that can influence later experience. Participants in our study viewed emotional images for about 20 minutes. Thus, one question is whether a single event that unfolds over the course of just a few minutes would have the same impact on later experience and memory formation. It is also unclear whether the influence of emotion on later brain activity and memory formation is dependent on a similar context being present during the emotional experience and neutral information or events encountered later on. Thus, more research is needed to understand how these findings are relevant for real-world experiences.
The study, “Emotional brain states carry over and enhance future memory formation“, was also co-authored by Ulrike Rimmele, Elizabeth A Phelps and Lila Davachi.
