Emotion enhances remembrance of neutral events past.

ABSTRACT: Emotional events are bestowed with special prominence in memory. This may reflect greater attention oriented to these events during encoding, and/or enhancement of memory consolidation after emotional events have passed. Here we show invoked emotional arousal results in a retrograde enhancement of long-term memory, determining what will later be remembered or forgotten. Subjects saw pictures of neutral faces and houses followed by emotionally arousing scenes at varying intervals. Self-reported emotional arousal responses predicted a retrograde enhancement of memory for preceding neutral events in a 1-week delayed recognition memory test. At longer picture-scene intervals, no enhancement was found, implicating a critical window in which emotional arousal must occur for retrograde memory enh

SUBMITTER: Anderson AK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1360523 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature