Elizabeth A. Kensinger : Remembering the Details: Effects of Emotion

There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences

Jane Austen’ Mansfield Park

I found a very interesting paper by Elizabeth A. Kensinger where she analises how does emotions affect memory and though emotion conveys memory benefits, it does not enhance memory equally for all aspects of an experience nor for all types of emotional events. In this review, I outline the behavioral evidence for arousal’s focal enhancements of memory and describe the neural processes that may support those focal enhancements. I also present behavioral evidence to suggest that these focal enhancements occur more often for negative experiences than for positive ones. This effect of valence appears to arise because of valence-dependent effects on the neural processes recruited during episodic encoding and retrieval, with negative affect associated with increased engagement of sensory processes and positive affect leading to enhanced recruitment of conceptual processes. 

The full article is here: 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2676782/

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