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Emotion and Memory

People's memories of past events possess different qualitative characteristics, including overall vividness. Certain events are recalled with high clarity and a great degree of detail, whereas other events are barely remembered. Research on the effects of emotion on memory has shown that emotion can play an important role in determining such differences in recall. Positive, negative, and neutral emotions can influence whether an event or information will be richly and vividly recollected. Investigations of emotion and memory have included studies of emotion and general autobiographical memories, eyewitness testimony, flashbulb memories, and memories for traumatic events. This entry examines each of these topics.

Emotion and General Autobiographical Memories

Events that are pleasant are often processed at a deeper level and, thus, recalled more accurately and faster than events that are unpleasant. Due to more vivid imagery associated with pleasant items, memory for positive information is more accessible, durable, and frequent than is memory for negative information. Margaret Matlin proposed that this phenomenon is part of the Pollyanna Principle. Another aspect of the Pollyanna Principle is the fading affect bias, which states that unpleasant memories fade faster than pleasant memories, because the emotion associated with unpleasant events weakens in intensity more than the emotion associated with pleasant events. Thus, overall, people have the tendency to focus on positive life experiences and are motivated to view their life events as relatively pleasant.

However, the Pollyanna Principle does not seem to apply to people with depressive tendencies. Individuals who are depressed tend to focus on negative events, and as a result, unpleasant emotions do not fade more quickly than pleasant emotions. With a profound sense of hopelessness, depressed individuals' autobiographical memories are biased toward unpleasantness. These individuals often recall mood-congruent material; that is, they have the tendency to recall more negative than positive material because negative material is congruent with their current mood. Depression is linked to less specific retrieval of positive memories. For example, investigations of patients who have recently attempted suicide reveal that their recent autobiographical memories consist of mostly negative episodes. Furthermore, there is a delay in these patients' ability to retrieve positive memories. Individuals who are at risk for depressive moods possess automatic negative and depressive biases, while also attempting to suppress their negative tendencies to inhibit the influence of depressive biases. As a result of this conflict, they often become relatively uncertain about the meaning of ambiguous information, and their memory for such information is tainted.

Emotion and Eyewitness Testimony

Individuals who experience a history of negative or traumatic events, such as a history of sexual or physical abuse, have reduced memory specificity. As a regulating strategy, these individuals routinely retrieve autobiographical memories in a less specific way to avoid being confronted with past painful memories. This strategy may be perceived as advantageous and protective in the short term. However, as Dirk Hermans and his colleagues suggested, in the long term, a cognitive avoidance strategy may turn out to be maladaptive, due to using an avoidant coping style to deal with feelings, thoughts, and problems.

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