Take a look around: how emotion boosts memory for context

Researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology demonstrated that emotion enhances memory for contextual details, challenging the view that emotion impairs the ability to remember such information.

The report was led by Paul Bogdan, who is currently a postdoc at Duke University, and Florin and Sanda Dolcos, professors of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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

“The story [of] emotion-memory interactions is still unfolding,” Florin Dolcos said. “We demonstrated the circumstances where you can prevent forgetting contextual details, which not only disrupts the status quo at the theoretical level, but also has practical implications about what you can do to control, channel and capitalize on the emotions’ energy to remember better.”

In emotional situations, people often focus more on the main subject — the crashed car, the yelling stranger, the crying child — and less on peripheral information. In three interconnected studies, the Beckman researchers linked behavioral, attentional and brain imaging data to build a complete image of emotion's impact and account for this involuntary attention shift.

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

In emotional situations that participants accurately recalled, functional magnetic resonance imaging data showed evidence of crosstalk between emotion-processing and recollection-processing brain regions, boosting recollection of contextual details. This is contrary to the prevalent view that emotion impairs memory for these details by inhibiting recollection-processing brain regions.

The complementary studies used Beckman’s eye-tracking facilities and one of its 3 Tesla MRI scanners. One study used webcam-based eye tracking, as participants took part remotely.

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

Knowing how emotion impacts memories and how to manage them is a major step toward contextualizing memories, increasing well-being and alleviating clinical conditions like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

PTSD is associated with memory decontextualization — a disconnect between the memory of a traumatic event and its context which causes the memory to be easily activated by unrelated triggers. The researchers hope that their findings contribute to strategies to prevent decontextualization and promote recontextualization.

This study also has general applications for enhancing memory. This is especially important for older individuals, as aging is often associated with declines in memory for contextual details.

Developing strategies for actively focusing attention on the entirety of an image or situation, rather than just the main focal point, can help slow memory declines.

“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 isn’t much that we can do about it, and thus the prospects are rather grim,” Sanda Dolcos said.

But this does not have to be the case.

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