Researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology demonstrated that emotion enhances memory for contextual details, challenging the view that emotion impairs the ability to remember such information. The report was led by doctoral student Paul Bogdan, currently a postdoc at Duke University, and Florin and Sanda Dolcos, professors of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Their research appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
The story [of] emotion-memory interactions is still unfolding. We demonstrated the circumstances where you can prevent forgetting contextual details, which not only disrupts the status quo at the theoretical level, but also has practical implications about what you can do to control, channel and capitalize on the emotions' energy to remember better." Florin Dolcos, Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign In emotional situations, people often focus more on the main subject -; the crashed car, the yelling stranger, the crying child -; and less on peripheral information.
In three interconnected studies, the Beckman researchers linked behavioral, attentional and brain imaging data to build a complete image of emotion's impact and account for this involuntary attention shift. They found that emotion enhances the ability to retrieve contextual details. In emotional situations that participants accurately recalled, functional magnetic resonance imaging data showed evidence.