How Your Emotions Affect Your Memory

We humans have a natural tendency to control and adjust our emotions that result from tense social situations. This is especially so with respect to our romantic relationships. What’s interesting is how these emotions affect our memory, and how males and females recall emotional events of the past differently.

According to researchers at both the University of Washington and Stanford University, the most common methods we use to regulate these emotions are known as “cognitive reappraisal” – which entails interpreting past situations in positive terms, and “expressive suppression” - meaning the way we tend to inhibit our more obvious symptoms caused by various emotional states.

The researchers suspected that, following tense social interactions like arguments, cognitive reappraisal helps increase our memory of what was ‘said’ by either person at the time. Suppression, on the other hand, decreases our memory for what was said and increases our ability to recollect the ‘emotions’ we experienced.

Memory Test - A Lovers’ Quarrel

To test their predictions, the researchers experimented by manipulating the reappraisal and suppression of dating couples while each discussed a particular conflict in their relationship. As expected, the abilities among the subjects to recall things that were said during their conversations increased with reappraisal and decreased with suppression, while their memory of emotional responses at the time increased with suppression.

Male & Female Memory Differences - Emotionally Speaking

Men and women process emotional memories differently. Women are believed to recall emotional memories better, and have a greater tendency to forget information presented immediately before reacting emotionally to information. This implies that women are affected more by emotional information, and reinforces the belief that men and women also encode their emotional experiences in different parts of the brain.

Steve Daitch is the Social Media Manager at Mind360.com – a leading scientific brain training games developer for boosting your memory, attention, executive functions, reasoning, and other key cognitive skills. As a Mind360 visitor you simply select your own Personal Training Program, which comes complete with a personal coach and constant feedback to ensure your swift and visible progress.