Emotional learning

Emotion can have a powerful effect on humans and animals. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events.

The activity of emotionally enhanced memory retention can be linked to human evolution; during early development, responsive behavior to environmental events would have progressed as a process of trial and error. Survival depended on behavioral patterns that were repeated or reinforced through life and death situations. Through evolution, this process of learning became genetically embedded in humans and all animal species in what is known as flight or fight instinct.

Artificially inducing this instinct through traumatic physical or emotional stimuli essentially creates the same physiological condition that heightens memory retention by exciting neuro-chemical activity affecting areas of the brain responsible for encoding and recalling memory. This memory-enhancing effect of emotion has been demonstrated in a large number of laboratory studies, using stimuli ranging from words to pictures to narrated slide shows, as well as autobiographical memory studies. However, as described below, emotion does not always enhance memory.

One of the most common frameworks in the emotions field proposes that affective experiences are best characterized by two main dimensions: arousal and valence. The dimension of valence ranges from highly positive to highly negative, whereas the dimension of arousal ranges from calming or soothing to exciting or agitating.

The majority of studies to date have focused on the arousal dimension of emotion as the critical factor contributing to the emotional enhancement effect on memory. Different explanations have been offered for this effect, according to the different stages of memory formation and reconstruction.

However, a growing body of research is dedicated to the emotional valence dimension and its effects on memory. It has been claimed that this is an essential step towards a more complete understanding of emotion effects on memory. The studies that did investigate this dimension have found that emotional valence alone can enhance memory; that is, nonarousing items with positive or negative valence can be better remembered than neutral items.

From an information processing perspective, encoding refers to the process of interpreting incoming stimuli and combining the processed information. At the encoding level the following mechanisms have been suggested as mediators of emotion effects on memory:

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