Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych
Exam Review. In the previous video on
memory failures I talked about this idea
of persistence and this was when someone
has a negative emotional memory that
keeps coming to mind repeatedly and
without their control. So it
ends up disrupting their life and so
this brings us to the relationship
between emotion and memory. In this
video I'd like to look at this
relationship in more detail and see a
few more examples of how emotion and
memory are linked. The first example
that we'll look at is what's called a
flashbulb memory. A flashbulb
memory refers to a more detailed memory
of a emotionally-charged event. When
we're in situations that evoke lots of
emotion we tend to form more detailed
memories of these events. Ok so an
example of this from my own life, and
many other people would relate to this,
would be September 11th. So I can
remember, I was a senior in high school
at the time, and I can remember the
classroom that I was in when we first
heard that something was happening and
we went down to one of the school
cafeterias. We watched on these little
tvs and I can remember other people who
were there, that were in that particular
class with me at the time, and so I have
a more detailed memory of that morning
than I do for some other random morning.
If you were to ask me ask me what I was
doing November 17th 2000,
you know, I don't know. Was it a
weekday, was it a weekend? I don't really
have any detailed memories of that
morning. Now that's not to say that my
memories of September 11 are
necessarily accurate. There's still
the possibility for bias and error and
these other memory failures that we've
already seen and the fact that we bring
this memory to mind more often means
that there's a pretty good likelihood of
suggestibility and reconstruction.
That we're going to change this memory
without realizing it each time we recall
it and when we think about it we're
going to integrate it with other
memories and things might get a little
bit distorted.
One study that looked at this
asked people about September 11 and asked
them if they remembered seeing the video
of the first plane hitting the first
tower and many people reported that they
vividly remembered seeing this on
September 11th but in fact they couldn't
have because that video wasn't available
until the following day. So this shows
that what happened was they
mixed these memories together. So we
have to remember that our flashbulb
memories are more detailed but they're
not necessarily accurate. Ok another
example of the relationship between
emotion and memory is what's called
state-dependent memory and so the idea
of state-dependent memory is that our
state when we encode and retrieve memory
is matched. So our ability to
retrieve a particular event might be
dependent on our state at the time.
What I mean by that is, let's say that
you've been drinking and so you
were a little bit drunk and you meet
someone at a party. Now if you meet that
person again when you're also drunk you
might find it easier to recall their
name and that's because your state at
encoding matches your state at retrieval
and that's what state-dependent memory
refers to. The idea is that state at
encoding, when you formed that memory,
the sort of physical state that you were
in matches with state at retrieval
and this makes it easier for you to
bring this memory to mind. A
related theory, and this is where there's
some confusion amongst a lot of students,
is the idea of mood-congruent memory.
So what's the difference here between
state-dependent memory and mood
congruent memory? Ok so in our state
dependent memory, let's say that if
you are happy right, your emotional state
when you're encoding this memory, you're
encoding a memory and you're happy at
the time, when you're happy later it's
easier to recall that memory
because you're in the same state as when
you encoded it. But in mood congruent
memory the idea is that your state at
retrieval matches the content of the
memory.
Ok, so what do I mean by that? Well the
idea here is that your emotional state
at the time is going to influence the
content of the memories that you recall.
For instance if you're feeling really
upset and I asked you about your
childhood and your parents, you're
more likely to tell me negative aspects,
you know, negative memories of that,
of your childhood experience or
of your relationship with your parents
or something. But if you're feeling
really happy your emotional state at the
time is more positive and I ask you the
same question about your childhood and
your relationship with your parents then
you're more likely to recall positive
content. Ok so it's not necessarily the
same as saying that it matched your
encoding state. You weren't necessarily
happy or upset at the time when you formed
those memories, when you were a child
but that the content, the emotional
content of those memories, is matched
with your current state at retrieval. So
that's what's called mood congruent
memory. So it's slightly different
from state-dependent memory and
hopefully I've made that clear. Ok, I
hope you found this helpful, if so, please
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channel for more. Thanks for watching!