Fact-checked by Grok 2 weeks ago

Emotion and memory

Emotion and memory encompasses the bidirectional relationship between affective states and cognitive processes of encoding, consolidation, storage, and retrieval, wherein emotions typically modulate memory formation to prioritize survival-relevant information through neural mechanisms involving the amygdala and hippocampus.^[1] This interplay is evolutionarily adaptive, as emotions direct attention and resources toward salient stimuli, enhancing long-term retention of emotionally charged events while often leading to trade-offs in detail accuracy.^[2] Key aspects include the enhancement of central details in emotional memories via arousal-induced synaptic plasticity, contrasted by impairments in peripheral or contextual elements, with negative emotions generally promoting more vivid perceptual recall than positive ones.^[3] Central to this field is the role of the amygdala in modulating memory consolidation, where it interacts with the hippocampus to strengthen emotional traces through the release of stress hormones like epinephrine and glucocorticoids.^[1] Positive emotions, such as happiness, facilitate broader conceptual processing and creative learning, improving performance on complex tasks, whereas negative emotions like fear or stress can impair working memory and synaptic plasticity under chronic conditions.^[2]^[1] These effects manifest across the lifespan, with emotional enhancements on recognition memory evident from middle childhood onward, though aging may alter the balance of benefits and distortions.^[4] Notable theories frame emotions as primary motivational systems—such as SEEKING for exploration or FEAR for threat avoidance—that underpin secondary learning hierarchies, ensuring memories of rewards or dangers endure for adaptive decision-making.^[2] However, emotion does not uniformly boost memory; valence, arousal, and motivational dimensions can lead to oversimplifications in research, with high-arousal events sometimes distorting source attribution or increasing false recollections despite heightened subjective vividness.^[3] This complexity underscores applications in clinical contexts, where dysregulated emotional memory contributes to disorders like PTSD or depression, highlighting the need for nuanced interventions targeting amygdala-hippocampal pathways.^[1]

Fundamental Concepts

Definition and Overview

Emotional memory refers to the processes of encoding, storage, and retrieval of information that is intertwined with affective states, including episodic recollections of emotionally charged events, semantic representations shaped by emotional experiences, and procedural memories formed under emotional influence.^[3] This phenomenon is distinguished from neutral memory by its tendency to produce more vivid, persistent, and detailed recollections, as emotional arousal modulates attentional focus and consolidation to prioritize affectively significant content.^[5] The historical foundations of emotional memory research date to William James's 1890 assertion that intense emotions imprint lasting "scars" on cerebral tissues, thereby influencing memory traces.^[6] Sigmund Freud expanded this in the early 20th century by theorizing that emotionally traumatic memories could be repressed into the unconscious, where they continue to affect behavior and mental health without conscious awareness.^[7] Following a period dominated by psychoanalytic perspectives, the field underwent a modern transformation in the post-1970s with the rise of cognitive psychology, which emphasized empirical investigations into emotional memory's adaptive roles in enhancing survival-oriented learning and recall.^[5] A key distinction of emotional memory lies in its evolutionary prioritization of survival-relevant information, such as potential threats, over mundane neutral facts, which facilitates rapid behavioral adaptation in dynamic environments.^[8] This underscores a bidirectional relationship wherein emotions actively shape memory formation and retrieval, while the reactivation of memories in turn elicits or intensifies emotional responses, creating a dynamic interplay essential for human cognition.^[9]

Dimensions of Emotion: Arousal and Valence

Emotions are commonly conceptualized within a two-dimensional framework that captures their core properties through the dimensions of arousal and valence, which interact to influence memory processes. Arousal refers to the intensity or activation level of an emotion, ranging from low (e.g., calm or sleepy states) to high (e.g., intense excitement or fear), and it modulates memory by enhancing consolidation and retrieval when elevated due to increased autonomic nervous system activation.^[10] Low arousal, in contrast, typically results in weaker memory traces, as it fails to trigger the same level of attentional prioritization and physiological engagement.^[11] Valence, the second dimension, describes the hedonic tone of an emotion as positive (e.g., pleasure or joy) or negative (e.g., displeasure or anger), with these poles shaping how emotional content is encoded and retained over time.^[10] This orthogonal structure—where arousal and valence are independent axes—forms the basis of the circumplex model of affect, proposed by James Russell, which graphically represents emotions as points on a circular plane to illustrate their combinations.^[10] A key aspect of valence in emotional memory is the negativity bias, wherein negative emotions lead to more vivid and durable recollections compared to positive ones, an effect attributed to evolutionary pressures favoring the prioritization of threats for survival.^[12] For instance, negative events are processed with greater intensity and detail, enhancing long-term retention as the brain allocates more resources to potential dangers, whereas positive events may fade more readily unless paired with high arousal.^[12] This bias manifests across various memory tasks, where negative valence boosts overall recall, particularly for central details, though peripheral details may be less well-remembered due to attentional narrowing.^[3] The circumplex model provides a visual framework for understanding these interactions, positioning emotions along the valence axis (from pleasant to unpleasant) and the arousal axis (from activated to deactivated), with specific examples highlighting their placement. Joy, for example, occupies a region of high positive valence and moderate arousal, contributing to enhanced memory through pleasant reinforcement without overwhelming intensity, while terror combines high negative valence with extreme arousal, amplifying memory via urgent threat detection.^[10] This model underscores how combinations of arousal and valence determine emotional impact on memory, such as moderate-arousal positive emotions supporting gist-based recall and high-arousal negative ones driving detailed, central retention.^[10] Empirical studies from the 1990s demonstrate arousal's role in boosting attention and memory formation, as seen in experiments where participants viewed sequences of slides narrated in either neutral or emotionally arousing contexts. In one such study, viewers of arousing stories—depicting events like a mother discovering her injured child—recalled significantly more central details after a two-week delay compared to those viewing neutral versions, with enhancement particularly pronounced in the emotional phase of the narrative.^[11] Regarding valence, research indicates that negative emotions exert a stronger influence on long-term retention than positive ones, with negative stimuli eliciting superior memory for central information due to heightened processing depth, though peripheral details are often less accurately recalled.^[3] These findings illustrate how arousal amplifies attentional capture during encoding, while negative valence sustains retention through evolutionary-tuned vigilance mechanisms.^[11]^[3]

Memory Processes Influenced by Emotion

Emotional Encoding

Emotional stimuli selectively capture attention more rapidly than neutral ones, facilitating their initial processing for memory encoding. In visual search paradigms, such as the snake detection task, threatening stimuli like snakes are detected faster than non-threatening items, with behavioral response times showing advantages of approximately 15 ms for fear-relevant targets compared to fear-irrelevant ones.^[13] Electrophysiological evidence further indicates that this selectivity occurs early, with enhanced event-related potentials, such as the early posterior negativity (EPN), emerging between 200-300 ms post-stimulus onset for emotional threats.^[14]^[15] This rapid attentional capture leads to prioritized processing of emotional information, where cognitive resources are automatically allocated to emotionally salient items. The dot-probe task, a common measure of attentional bias, reveals faster responses to probes replacing emotional stimuli (e.g., angry faces) than neutral ones, indicating spatial prioritization of emotional content.^[16] The amygdala acts as a key gatekeeper in this process, modulating sensory inputs to enhance perceptual processing of emotionally relevant stimuli.^[17] Arousal plays a critical role in deepening the semantic encoding of emotional events, promoting more elaborate and meaningful representation in memory. High-arousal stimuli elicit greater engagement of semantic networks, leading to superior integration of information beyond superficial features.^[18] This is exemplified by the emotional word superiority effect, where high-arousal emotional words (e.g., positive or negative terms) are more accurately identified when embedded in briefly presented letter strings compared to neutral words, reflecting enhanced perceptual and semantic processing during encoding.^[19] Valence-specific effects further shape encoding, with negative emotions often enhancing memory for central details through heightened sensory recruitment and focal attention, while positive emotions promote broader associative processing that can improve recall of peripheral or relational elements.^[3] For instance, negative valence can amplify vivid recollection of intrinsic features of emotional objects in scenes, whereas positive valence facilitates gist-like encoding of broader event narratives.^[20]^[21]

Emotional Storage and Consolidation

Emotional content promotes richer relational binding during storage by linking events to personal meaning and contextual details, enhancing the elaboration of memory traces through amygdala-hippocampal interactions.^[22] This process strengthens associations, such as connecting an emotional event to its spatiotemporal context, via norepinephrine-mediated modulation of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus.^[23] The consolidation of emotional memories involves the re-activation of engram ensembles, which stabilizes traces over time by promoting synaptic strengthening and integration across neural circuits.^[24] Time-dependent effects are prominent, with emotions facilitating stabilization within the initial hours post-encoding, during which protein synthesis and ERK signaling transform transient into persistent long-term memories in the hippocampus.^[25] Hormonal influences, such as cortisol, briefly support this phase by modulating amygdala activity to enhance consolidation.^[25] Synaptic plasticity underlies emotional storage, with long-term potentiation (LTP) in the hippocampus markedly enhanced by emotional arousal through basolateral amygdala inputs.^[25] In animal models, fear conditioning increases hippocampal LTP, particularly in the CA1 region, by elevating noradrenergic signaling that sustains late-phase LTP via protein synthesis-dependent mechanisms.^[24] This arousal-induced potentiation ensures durable encoding of emotionally salient events.^[23] Emotional memories differ in storage from neutral ones, being distributed more redundantly across brain networks including the hippocampus, amygdala, and neocortex to confer resilience against degradation or interference.^[24] This multi-site engram formation allows parallel processing and partial recovery even if specific regions are disrupted, as seen in optogenetic studies of fear engrams.^[26]

Emotional Retrieval

Emotional retrieval refers to the processes by which emotions influence the accessibility and accuracy of recalling stored memories, often biasing recall toward emotionally salient aspects while potentially impairing other details. In emotionally charged events, memories tend to prioritize the central gist or theme over peripheral information, a phenomenon known as the central-peripheral trade-off. For instance, in eyewitness accounts of crimes involving weapons, witnesses exhibit reduced recall for the perpetrator's facial features and clothing due to heightened attention on the threatening object, a pattern termed the weapon focus effect. This effect arises from arousal-driven attentional narrowing, where emotional intensity directs cognitive resources toward the primary threat, leading to poorer memory for non-central elements.^[27] Contextual factors, such as the individual's current emotional state, further modulate retrieval by facilitating access to memories that align with that state. Mood-congruent retrieval occurs when a person's prevailing mood enhances recall of events matching its valence, such as negative moods prompting retrieval of unpleasant experiences more readily than positive ones. This bias stems from associative networks where emotional states serve as retrieval cues, strengthening activation of congruent material during recall. Similarly, state-dependent memory in emotional contexts demonstrates that recall improves when the emotional or physiological state at retrieval matches that during encoding, as seen in studies where anxious states during learning lead to better performance under subsequent anxiety compared to calm conditions.^[28]^[29] The nature of the emotional stimulus also affects retrieval dynamics, with distinctions between thematically embedded and sudden-onset emotions. Emotions integrated thematically into a narrative, such as the climax of a story, promote holistic recall by enhancing connectivity across event elements, leading to better memory for the overall structure and sequence. In contrast, sudden emotional shocks, exemplified by flashbulb memories of shocking public events like assassinations, confer high vividness and confidence in recall but often at the cost of accuracy, with overestimations of detail precision over time. These memories arise from a specialized "now print!" mechanism triggered by surprise and personal consequence, prioritizing sensory snapshots over verbatim fidelity.^[3]^[30] Involuntary retrieval represents a maladaptive extreme where emotional cues automatically trigger unbidden memories, bypassing voluntary control. In posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), trauma-related stimuli evoke intrusive flashbacks that replay sensory and emotional components of the event with intense vividness, disrupting daily functioning. These intrusions differ from voluntary recall by their fragmentary, sensory-driven quality and heightened emotional reactivity, often reinforcing the original trauma's impact without contextual integration.^[31]

Neurobiological Mechanisms

Brain Structures and Circuits

The amygdala plays a central role in modulating hippocampal encoding to prioritize emotionally salient information for long-term memory storage. Through its interactions with the hippocampus, the amygdala enhances the consolidation of emotional memories by influencing synaptic plasticity in hippocampal neurons, particularly during periods of high arousal. This modulation ensures that events with emotional significance, such as threats or rewards, are more readily stored and retrieved compared to neutral ones.^[32] A key aspect of this interaction is the dual-pathway model of emotional processing, which involves a fast subcortical route ("low road") from the thalamus directly to the amygdala for rapid detection of potential threats, bypassing detailed cortical analysis, and a slower cortical route ("high road") through sensory cortices to the amygdala for more nuanced integration of contextual information. In the context of memory, the fast pathway facilitates immediate emotional tagging of stimuli, while the slow pathway supports the binding of emotional valence to episodic details in the hippocampus, leading to enhanced memory accuracy for arousing events.^[33]^[34] The prefrontal cortex (PFC) further refines emotional memory through distinct subregional contributions. The ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) integrates emotional valence by encoding the subjective value of stimuli, facilitating the association of positive or negative affect with memory traces during encoding and consolidation. In contrast, the dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC) is involved in regulatory processes during retrieval, exerting top-down control to suppress or amplify emotional memories based on contextual demands, such as in reappraisal tasks.^[35]^[36] Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies from the 2020s have provided evidence that the strength of fronto-limbic connectivity, particularly between the PFC and amygdala, predicts individual differences in emotional memory performance. This connectivity supports adaptive prioritization of salient information while mitigating overgeneralization of emotional responses. Circuits underlying memory enhancement prominently feature projections from the basolateral amygdala (BLA) to sensory cortices, which enable prioritized perceptual processing of emotional stimuli. These projections amplify neural representations in visual, auditory, and other sensory areas, sharpening attention and feature binding for emotionally relevant details, thereby boosting encoding efficiency without overwhelming neutral processing pathways.^[2]^[37]

Neurochemical and Hormonal Factors

Norepinephrine, released from the locus coeruleus during states of arousal, plays a pivotal role in enhancing the encoding of emotionally salient information by increasing neural gain and selectivity in perceptual and memory processes.^[38] This modulation promotes synaptic plasticity, such as long-term potentiation, particularly in regions involved in emotional processing.^[39] The effects follow an inverted U-shaped curve, where moderate levels of norepinephrine optimize memory performance by balancing attention and consolidation, while low levels fail to sufficiently prioritize stimuli and high levels lead to overstimulation and impaired efficiency.^[40] For instance, phasic activation of the locus coeruleus at intermediate intensities strengthens memory for arousing events, as demonstrated in studies of attentional and emotional learning tasks.^[41] Cortisol, the primary stress hormone released via activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, exerts dose- and time-dependent influences on emotional memory consolidation through interactions with glucocorticoid receptors. Acute elevations in cortisol, such as those following brief stressors, enhance the consolidation of emotionally arousing memories by facilitating amygdala-hippocampal interactions and strengthening synaptic traces in the hippocampus.^[42] This effect is mediated primarily by type II glucocorticoid receptors, which promote long-term potentiation and prioritize the storage of salient experiences, as evidenced in human studies where post-learning cortisol administration improved recall of emotional stimuli.^[43] In contrast, chronic cortisol exposure, often seen in prolonged stress, dysregulates the HPA axis and impairs consolidation by downregulating receptors, reducing dendritic arborization, and inhibiting brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) expression in the hippocampus, leading to deficits in declarative and emotional memory.^[42] Dopamine contributes to the formation and retrieval of reward-based emotional memories by signaling prediction errors and reinforcing motivational salience during encoding. In reward contexts, dopamine release in the amygdala and medial temporal lobe modulates the consolidation of positive emotional experiences, enhancing their long-term accessibility through strengthened neural connectivities.^[44] This process is particularly evident in tasks involving incentive motivation, where dopamine facilitates the integration of emotional valence with memory traces. Serotonin, meanwhile, helps maintain mood-valence balance in emotional memory by regulating anxiety-related processing and fear learning, with optimal levels supporting adaptive extinction and expression of aversive memories.^[45] Dysregulation, such as through serotonin transporter variations, can bias emotional memory toward heightened negative valence, influencing prefrontal-amygdala interactions during mood-congruent recall.^[45] Recent advances highlight the cortisol awakening response (CAR), a transient morning surge in cortisol, as a proactive modulator of fronto-limbic networks that prepares the brain for daily emotional processing. A 2025 study demonstrates that the CAR proactively modulates connectivity between the right amygdala and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during emotional tasks, supporting discrimination of affective stimuli in healthy adults.^[46] This anticipatory tuning via glucocorticoid signaling supports resilient emotional regulation throughout the day, with pharmacological suppression of CAR revealing reduced accuracy in emotion matching and altered network dynamics.^[46]

Specific Phenomena in Emotional Memory

Memory Enhancement Effects

Emotional events are generally remembered more accurately and durably than neutral ones, with studies showing that arousal during encoding can lead to better recall after one week compared to neutral stimuli.^[47] This enhancement is particularly pronounced over longer delays, such as weeks or months, where the memory advantage for emotional content emerges and strengthens due to slower forgetting rates.^[48] For instance, survival processing—imagining information in a context relevant to survival, such as evading predators in a grassland scenario—produces recall levels superior to many standard encoding techniques, suggesting an evolutionary tuning of memory toward fitness-relevant details.^[49] Positive emotions contribute to memory enhancement by improving relational binding, such as associating faces with scenes, which supports more cohesive episodic recall.^[50] In aging populations, this manifests as a positivity offset, where older adults exhibit a relative preference for remembering positive over negative information, as confirmed by meta-analytic evidence showing this bias in attention and memory tasks.^[51] Negative emotions sharpen memory particularly for threat-related information, prioritizing central details of potential dangers while sometimes narrowing focus.^[52] This "tunnel memory" effect enhances accuracy for core elements of an event, such as the perpetrator's face in a traumatic encounter, at the potential expense of peripheral context.^[53] Despite these benefits, emotional enhancement often trades off with potential distortions, as seen in flashbulb memories where individuals maintain high confidence in vivid recollections of shocking public events, even when details prove inaccurate over time.

Emotion-Induced Forgetting

Emotion-induced forgetting encompasses cognitive and neural processes through which emotional arousal or valence actively impairs the accessibility, retention, or integration of memories, serving both adaptive functions like threat avoidance and maladaptive ones like persistent suppression failures. Unlike passive decay, this form of forgetting often involves deliberate or automatic inhibitory mechanisms triggered by emotional content, leading to reduced recall or overwriting of prior information. Research highlights how such forgetting can protect psychological well-being by minimizing rumination on distressing events but may also contribute to incomplete memory resolution in trauma contexts. Directed forgetting, a key mechanism in emotion-induced forgetting, occurs when emotional cues prompt the intentional suppression of associated memories. In the think/no-think (TNT) paradigm, participants practice retrieving or avoiding thoughts linked to emotional stimuli, resulting in impaired recall for suppressed items. For instance, suppression of negative emotional words yields greater forgetting compared to neutral ones, with recall reductions of around 7-10% observed across studies, demonstrating emotion's role in enhancing inhibitory control over memory traces. ^[54] This effect extends to associative memories formed through fear conditioning, where directed suppression disrupts links between neutral cues and emotional outcomes, reducing fear responses in subsequent tests. ^[55] Prefrontal cortex engagement facilitates this suppression by inhibiting hippocampal retrieval, though detailed circuitry is explored elsewhere. Motivated forgetting further illustrates emotion's suppressive influence, particularly in avoiding painful or aversive memories through conscious inhibitory efforts. Individuals often deploy this strategy to evade trauma-related recollections, relying on executive control to block intrusions. However, attempts at suppression can backfire due to the irony effect, as seen in the seminal white bear paradigm, where instructions to avoid thinking of a white bear lead to increased intrusions of the thought, especially under cognitive load or emotional distress. ^[56] This paradoxical rebound underscores the dual-process nature of inhibition—automatic monitoring for unwanted content inadvertently strengthens its activation—highlighting maladaptive risks in emotion-laden forgetting. ^[57] Retroactive interference represents another pathway for emotion-induced forgetting, where novel emotional experiences overwrite or disrupt memories of preceding neutral events. In list-learning tasks, the introduction of an emotionally arousing item after a series of neutral ones impairs the semantic clustering and free recall of the earlier list, as negative affect fragments organizational structures in episodic memory. ^[58] This overwriting effect is particularly pronounced for unrelated neutral content, where emotional novelty competes for consolidation resources, effectively erasing finer details of prior neutral experiences. Evidence from experimental designs shows that high-arousal emotional intrusions reduce accuracy in recalling list positions, emphasizing emotion's disruptive power in sequential memory formation. Recent advancements in rodent models have elucidated neurobiological underpinnings of emotion-induced forgetting, focusing on amygdala modulation during fear extinction to diminish trauma-related memories. Between 2021 and 2024, studies employing optogenetic techniques demonstrated that inhibiting basolateral amygdala activity post-fear conditioning accelerates extinction learning and persistently lowers fear recall, reducing conditioned freezing responses in subsequent exposures. ^[59] These findings reveal adaptive forgetting as an active process, where targeted amygdala suppression prevents fear engram reactivation, offering translational potential for therapeutic interventions in emotional disorders while avoiding generalized memory loss.

Memory of Felt Emotions

The memory of felt emotions refers to the recollection of subjective affective experiences, such as the intensity and quality of joy, anger, or sadness during past events, distinct from the factual details of what occurred. These memories emphasize the "how it felt" aspect, often prioritizing internal sensations and personal significance over external context. Research indicates that such recollections are reconstructed at retrieval rather than stored verbatim, influenced by current expectations, personality traits, and cultural factors, leading to a focus on peak and end moments that disproportionately shape the remembered emotional experience.^[60] Over time, the intensity of felt emotions tends to decay, with negative affects fading more rapidly than positive ones—a phenomenon known as the fading affect bias—yet the core affective tone, or valence (positive or negative), persists more enduringly. This selective retention helps maintain emotional equilibrium, as unpleasant intensities diminish faster (e.g., the sting of a personal failure softens within months), while the fundamental emotional flavor endures for years, supported by amygdala reactivation during recall. In contrast to neutral event memories, which prioritize factual accuracy and show steadier detail retention, emotional recollections exhibit heightened vividness and confidence but greater inconsistency over delays, often tunneling on affective details like bodily arousal or interpretive meaning.^[61]^[60] Misattribution plays a key role in recalling felt emotions, where current mood states bias perceptions of past affective experiences, as seen in the hot-cold empathy gap. Individuals in a neutral or "cold" state underestimate the intensity of prior "hot" emotional episodes (e.g., recalling the fury of an argument as milder than it was), while those in an aroused state may overestimate calm past moments, leading to systematic errors in emotional forecasting and self-understanding. This gap arises from constrained access to affective memories, projecting the present state onto the past and complicating accurate retrieval.^[62] Autobiographical emotional memories contribute significantly to self-identity, serving as building blocks for personal narratives and continuity over time. They reinforce one's sense of self by linking past feelings to ongoing traits (e.g., recalling persistent resilience from a triumphant moment bolsters current self-view). Diary studies reveal biases in these recollections, such as overestimation of past happiness when current mood is positive, where participants retrospectively inflate joyful episodes compared to contemporaneous entries, highlighting how emotional memories are tuned to support adaptive self-concepts rather than precise historical records.^[60] Cultural variations influence the recall of felt emotions, with a 2023 meta-analysis showing that individuals in collectivist societies (e.g., East Asian cultures) report more subdued and contextually embedded emotional recollections compared to those in individualist societies (e.g., Western cultures), who emphasize personal intensity and autonomy in affective narratives. This difference stems from varying emotion norms, where collectivists prioritize relational harmony in memory reconstruction, leading to less vivid recall of self-focused highs or lows.^[63]

Emotion Regulation and Memory

Regulatory Strategies and Their Mechanisms

Cognitive reappraisal is a regulatory strategy that involves reframing the meaning of an emotional event to alter its emotional impact, thereby reducing physiological arousal and negative affect. This approach targets the early appraisal stage of emotion generation, leading to decreased activation in the amygdala, a key region for emotional processing, as evidenced by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. Specifically, reappraisal engages prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions, such as the ventrolateral and dorsolateral PFC, which exert top-down control to downregulate amygdala responses, resulting in sustained reductions in emotional reactivity without the physiological costs associated with other strategies.^[64]^[65] Expressive suppression, in contrast, entails the direct inhibition of overt emotional expressions, such as facial or behavioral displays, while allowing internal emotional experiences to persist. This strategy is short-term effective in modulating visible emotional responses but often fails to alter underlying affective states and can lead to rebound effects, where suppressed emotions resurface more intensely after the inhibition period. Neurally, suppression recruits dorsolateral PFC and anterior cingulate cortex to monitor and override prepotent responses, yet it paradoxically increases amygdala activity in some contexts and does not achieve the same level of emotional downregulation as reappraisal. Suppression has also been associated with directed forgetting of emotional memories, though its mechanisms in this regard are explored further in related phenomena.^[64]^[66] Extinction learning serves as a behavioral strategy to diminish maladaptive emotional memories, particularly fear associations, through repeated non-reinforced exposure to the conditioned stimulus, forming new inhibitory associations that compete with the original memory trace. This process underlies exposure therapy and involves the ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) in inhibiting amygdala-driven fear responses, with consolidation supported by the hippocampus and infralimbic cortex in preclinical models. Seminal research highlights that extinction acquisition relies on NMDA receptor-dependent plasticity in the amygdala, while retrieval engages PFC-amygdala circuits to suppress fear expression, preventing spontaneous recovery of the original memory.^[67] Recent advances in mindfulness-based interventions, such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), have demonstrated efficacy in enhancing emotion regulation of memories through neuroplastic changes in the PFC. A 2024 review indicates that these practices promote structural and functional alterations in the PFC, including increased gray matter density and connectivity with limbic regions, fostering adaptive reappraisal and reduced amygdala hyperactivity during emotional recall. These interventions leverage sustained attention and non-judgmental awareness to modulate emotional memory processing, with longitudinal studies showing lasting improvements in regulatory capacity via enhanced prefrontal control.^[68]

Effects on Encoding and Retrieval

Emotion regulation strategies, such as reappraisal, modulate the encoding of emotional information by diminishing the emotional significance or "tagging" assigned to stimuli during initial processing. When individuals reappraise an emotional event—for instance, by adopting a detached perspective—neural activity associated with emotional salience, like in the amygdala, is reduced, leading to attenuated prioritization of emotional components in memory compared to unregulated encoding. ^[69] This effect is particularly evident in tasks involving mnemonic discrimination, where reappraisal decreases the negativity bias, improving accuracy for neutral elements while attenuating recall for negative ones. ^[69] For example, in studies using emotional images, participants who reappraised during viewing showed balanced memory trade-offs, with reduced prioritization of central emotional details over peripheral neutral ones. ^[70] During retrieval, regulated emotions weaken mood-congruent biases, whereby memories aligned with current affective states are typically favored. By downregulating emotional intensity at encoding, reappraisal disrupts the automatic retrieval of affectively congruent information, fostering more neutral access to past events. ^[71] Evidence from meta-analyses of 2020s research indicates that emotion regulation techniques, including reappraisal, significantly reduce the frequency of intrusive thoughts—unwanted, involuntary recollections often biased by prior mood—particularly when applied peri-traumatically in lab-analogue paradigms (Hedges’ g = 0.37). ^[71] This attenuation helps mitigate the persistence of emotionally charged memories that might otherwise reinforce negative mood states. Over the long term, habitual use of emotion regulation, such as reappraisal, is associated with enhanced detail and clarity in the recall of emotional autobiographical memories, including sensory aspects, at follow-ups spanning weeks to months. Individuals who frequently employ reappraisal demonstrate superior recall of sensory details in such memories, as these strategies promote objective processing without overemphasizing emotional valence. ^[72] This leads to more balanced representations, where neutral aspects intertwined with emotional ones are not overshadowed, improving overall fidelity and reducing distortion from affective influences. ^[72] Individual differences in emotion regulation proficiency influence the ability to discriminate true emotional memories from false or intrusive ones. High regulators, particularly those skilled in reappraisal or suppression, exhibit greater control over retrieval, resulting in fewer false intrusions and better differentiation between veridical and fabricated emotional details. ^[73] For instance, stronger suppression abilities correlate with reduced amygdala reactivity to suppressed items, enabling precise source monitoring and minimizing mood-driven confabulations in emotional recall. ^[73]

Emotional Memory in Psychopathology

Depression and Emotional Memory

Depression is characterized by a pronounced negative bias in emotional memory, where individuals exhibit enhanced recall and recognition of negative or sad events compared to positive or neutral ones. This bias manifests as potentiated memory for negative stimuli, often accompanied by reduced memory for positive events, contributing to the maintenance of depressive symptoms.^[74] Neuroimaging studies have identified heightened familiarity signals in the brain during retrieval of negative information, driving this retrieval bias even in remitted states.^[75] Rumination, a repetitive focus on negative emotions and experiences common in depression, amplifies this negative bias by enhancing emotional elaboration during memory encoding and retrieval. This process strengthens the consolidation of sad events through prolonged dwelling, which mediates the link between interpretive and memory biases and overall depressive symptomatology.^[76] Such rumination not only reinforces negative self-referential memories but also perpetuates the cycle of biased emotional processing.^[77] Chronic stress associated with depression leads to hippocampal atrophy, reducing the structure's volume and impairing the consolidation of emotional memories. This atrophy, driven by prolonged glucocorticoid exposure, disrupts neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus, resulting in broader cognitive deficits including memory impairments.^[78] Recent 2025 neuroimaging reviews confirm that these volumetric changes correlate with specific cognitive vulnerabilities in depression, such as deficits in episodic memory formation.^[79] Depression also disrupts emotional working memory capacity, particularly for processing negative distractors, leading to difficulties in updating and maintaining relevant emotional information. This impairment hinders the inhibition of irrelevant negative content, exacerbating attentional capture by depressive themes and reducing overall working memory efficiency.^[80] Recent advances, including 2024 studies, highlight cognitive biases in interpretation and memory as prospective predictors of depressive episodes, suggesting their role in vulnerability and recurrence. Meta-analyses indicate that these biases, such as negative memory recall, reliably forecast symptom onset, informing targeted interventions like bias modification training.^[81]^[82]

Dementia and Emotional Memory

In dementia, emotional memory deficits arise primarily from neurodegeneration in the amygdala and hippocampus, structures critical for modulating the emotional enhancement of memory (EEM). Early degeneration in these regions leads to a progressive loss of EEM, where patients often fail to show superior recall for emotional stimuli compared to neutral ones, and in some cases, recall neutral items better than emotional ones. This reversal or absence of enhancement is linked to amygdala atrophy, which disrupts the typical prioritization of emotionally salient information during encoding and retrieval.^[83] Hippocampal involvement further exacerbates declarative memory impairments, particularly for explicit emotional events, as seen in neuroimaging studies correlating volume loss with diminished EEM.^[84] Despite these explicit deficits, implicit emotional memory shows remarkable preservation in dementia. For instance, skin conductance responses to emotional cues, such as arousing scenes, remain enhanced relative to neutral stimuli, even when patients exhibit explicit forgetting of the same material. This dissociation highlights that subcortical autonomic pathways, less affected by early neurodegeneration, sustain physiological reactivity to emotions, potentially serving as a compensatory mechanism.^[85] In Alzheimer's disease (AD), a common form of dementia, valence effects on memory are notably reduced, with patients displaying diminished differentiation between positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. Studies indicate that emotional enhancement of memory is preserved in mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a prodromal stage of AD, with superior recall for emotional compared to neutral stimuli, though EEM may be reduced relative to healthy older adults and is more impaired in later stages of AD.^[86]^[83] This pattern correlates with early amygdala-hippocampal atrophy and predicts progression to AD. A 2025 systematic review confirms preserved EEM in early dementia stages, suggesting potential for targeted interventions leveraging emotional content.^[84] Emotional recognition deficits vary across dementia subtypes. In dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), patients exhibit reduced vocal and facial emotional expressiveness, particularly lower valence and arousal in responses, though prodromal stages may spare basic recognition.^[87] In contrast, frontotemporal dementia (FTD), especially the behavioral variant, shows more pronounced impairments in recognizing emotions from facial cues, often scoring lowest on tasks compared to DLB or controls, due to prefrontal and temporal lobe degeneration affecting social cognition.^[87]

Lifespan and Emotional Memory

Development Across Childhood and Adolescence

During infancy, the foundations of emotional memory begin to form, with basic recognition of emotions emerging around 6 months of age. Infants at this stage demonstrate the ability to visually recognize and differentiate emotional facial expressions, such as sadness and anger, which supports early social and memory processes.^[88] This recognition is linked to neural responses in brain regions involved in emotion processing, occurring as early as 200-290 milliseconds after stimulus onset for fearful faces.^[89] Concurrently, attachment memories develop through classical conditioning mechanisms, where repeated pairings of a caregiver's presence with comfort and relief from distress create enduring emotional associations.^[90] These early attachments, forming bidirectional bonds between infant and caregiver, lay the groundwork for emotional memory by integrating sensory and affective experiences into implicit memory systems.^[91] In childhood, emotional memory matures with heightened sensitivity to valence effects, particularly noticeable by age 7. At this stage, children show enhanced memory accuracy for emotionally charged information, especially abstract words with positive or negative valence, compared to neutral content.^[92] Stress further modulates these effects, as 6- to 7-year-olds exhibit suppressed recall for low-arousal negative items relative to neutral or positive ones, with girls displaying stronger cortisol responses that influence this pattern.^[93] The negativity bias intensifies during this period, especially for social threats, leading to superior memory retention of threatening social actions over neutral or positive ones.^[94] This bias, evident in children's narratives and recall of valenced events, prioritizes negative social-emotional information to facilitate threat avoidance and social learning.^[95] Adolescence marks a period of amplified emotional memory encoding driven by pubertal hormones, which enhance plasticity in brain circuits supporting affective recall. For instance, variations in pubertal hormone levels moderate stress responses, with lower hormone concentrations in girls linked to better memory for negative emotional stimuli under cortisol elevation.^[96] These hormonal shifts, interacting with neural development, heighten emotional reactivity and consolidate memories of intense experiences more robustly.^[97] However, this heightened encoding also elevates vulnerability to maladaptive emotional memories, particularly from trauma, where adolescents may develop intrusive, sensory-dominant recollections that persist and contribute to psychopathology.^[98] Traumatized adolescents often exhibit altered neurobiological profiles, with disrupted emotion regulation amplifying the storage and retrieval of adverse events.^[99]

Aging and Emotional Memory Changes

As individuals age, emotional memory undergoes notable shifts, often characterized by a prioritization of positive information over negative, a phenomenon known as the positivity effect. This effect reflects older adults' tendency to exhibit enhanced recall for positive emotional stimuli compared to negative ones, in contrast to younger adults who typically show the opposite bias. According to socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), proposed by Laura L. Carstensen in the 1990s, older adults perceive time as more limited, leading them to prioritize emotionally meaningful and positive experiences to optimize well-being. A meta-analysis of 100 studies involving over 7,000 participants confirmed the reliability of this positivity effect in memory, with older adults demonstrating a small but significant bias toward positive recall (Cohen's d = 0.128), while younger adults favored negative information (d = -0.123).^[100] This shift is linked to declines in processing negative emotional information, including reduced neural responses in the amygdala to threatening or negative stimuli. Neuroimaging studies indicate that older adults display attenuated amygdala activation when viewing negative images, which correlates with diminished memory for such material and may serve an adaptive function by minimizing distress.^[101] For instance, functional connectivity analyses show that age-related reductions in amygdala engagement with negative stimuli contribute to poorer encoding and retrieval of aversive events, further supporting the positivity bias.^[102] To compensate for age-related memory declines, older adults increasingly rely on semantic emotional knowledge—accumulated conceptual understanding of emotions—rather than episodic details. This mechanism enhances emotional processing when stimuli allow for elaboration, as evidenced by greater prefrontal and temporal lobe activation in older adults during tasks involving semantically rich emotional content.^[103] Such reliance helps maintain emotional memory performance despite hippocampal atrophy. Health comorbidities, particularly mild depressive symptoms, can exacerbate emotional memory deficits in aging by diminishing the positivity effect. Studies show that even subclinical depression in older adults leads to reduced preferential recall of positive information and improved memory for negative stimuli, potentially increasing vulnerability to rumination.^[104] This interaction highlights how emotional well-being modulates age-related changes in memory.^[105]

Sleep and Emotional Memory

Consolidation During Sleep Stages

Sleep plays a critical role in the consolidation of emotional memories, with distinct contributions from slow-wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stages. During SWS, the brain replays emotional traces, strengthening synaptic connections associated with affective experiences through coordinated neural oscillations. This replay mechanism facilitates the transfer of labile emotional memories from the hippocampus to more stable cortical representations, enhancing long-term retention of emotionally salient information.^[106] In SWS, sleep spindles—bursts of 11-16 Hz activity generated in the thalamus—play a pivotal role in linking the amygdala and hippocampus, promoting the integration of emotional valence with contextual details. These spindles couple with slow oscillations (0.5-4 Hz), creating windows for the reactivation and stabilization of amygdala-hippocampal circuits that encode fear or reward-related memories. This coordination ensures that emotional significance is preserved while details are refined, as evidenced by enhanced slow oscillation-spindle coupling correlating with better consolidation of negative emotional memories in humans.^[107]^[108] REM sleep, characterized by heightened theta wave activity (4-8 Hz) in limbic regions, supports emotional processing by modulating the intensity of memories and extracting their relational gist. Theta oscillations during REM facilitate the abstraction of core emotional themes from complex experiences, often reflected in dream content, which aids in integrating affective information with existing schemas. This stage particularly benefits the transformation of emotional memories, reducing their raw intensity while preserving adaptive insights, as theta power in REM positively associates with representational changes in emotional memory networks.^[109]^[110] Empirical evidence from nap studies demonstrates the stage-specific benefits, with SWS-rich naps leading to significantly greater recall accuracy for emotional stimuli compared to wakefulness or REM-dominant naps, underscoring SWS's role in stabilizing affective details. In rodent models from 2020-2025, fear memory engrams in the hippocampus reactivate during SWS, with optogenetic manipulations confirming that this replay strengthens dendritic spines in engram cells, enhancing fear consolidation without sleep deprivation. These findings highlight sleep's mechanistic support for emotional memory integration across species.^[111]^[112] Adaptively, sleep during these stages reduces emotional reactivity to daytime events by decoupling sensory details from affective cores, allowing for more balanced processing of prior experiences. This attenuation prevents overgeneralization of negative emotions, as shown in human studies where post-sleep exposure to cues elicits diminished amygdala responses compared to sleep-deprived states.^[113]

Impact of Sleep Disruption

Sleep deprivation impairs the selective encoding of emotional memories, reducing the ability to prioritize emotionally salient information over neutral stimuli during initial learning. Studies demonstrate that total sleep deprivation disrupts prefrontal cortex function, leading to diminished selectivity in encoding emotional content, which results in poorer differentiation between emotional and non-emotional memories.^[114]^[115] For instance, after 24 hours of wakefulness, emotional memory accuracy is significantly reduced compared to rested conditions, as evidenced by declines in recognition performance for emotionally charged stimuli.^[116] Sleep disorders such as insomnia exacerbate these impairments by heightening amygdala reactivity, which promotes over-consolidation of negative emotional memories and contributes to persistent affective biases. In individuals with insomnia, disrupted sleep fails to downregulate amygdala responses to negative stimuli, resulting in heightened salience of past negative experiences and increased vulnerability to anxiety disorders.^[117]^[118] This over-consolidation is linked to altered functional connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal regions, sustaining emotional dysregulation even during wakefulness.^[113] Catch-up sleep following deprivation offers only partial restoration of emotional memory processes, often failing to fully reverse encoding deficits or amygdala hyperactivity. Research indicates that while one or two nights of recovery sleep can attenuate some working memory impairments, it does not completely reinstate selective consolidation or accuracy for emotional content, leaving residual biases intact.^[119]^[120] Recent 2024 studies on shift workers, who experience chronic sleep disruption, reveal persistent negative emotional memory biases, including elevated recall of aversive events and heightened anxiety symptoms, underscoring the long-term risks of irregular sleep patterns.^[121] These effects are particularly pronounced in aging populations, where sleep disruption amplifies age-related declines in emotional memory. In older adults, fragmented sleep exacerbates the positivity effect's erosion, leading to greater retention of negative memories and accelerated cognitive vulnerabilities, as shown in recent neuroimaging studies.^[122]^[123] This interaction highlights sleep's role in moderating emotional memory across the lifespan, with chronic disruptions compounding neurodegenerative risks.^[124]

References

[1]
Effect of emotions on learning, memory, and disorders associated ...
Jun 26, 2024 · Emotional responses such as fear, depression, and stress have impaired effects on cognitive functions such as learning and memory.
[2]
Frontiers | The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory
Summary of each segment:
[3]
Remembering the Details: Effects of Emotion - PMC - PubMed Central
Though emotion conveys memory benefits, it does not enhance memory equally for all aspects of an experience nor for all types of emotional events.
[4]
Emotion effects on memory from childhood through adulthood
These results suggest that emotion effects on recognition memory are apparent by middle childhood and remain consistent across adolescence and early adulthood ...Results · Recognition Memory... · Emotional Memory Enhancement...
[5]
Making lasting memories: Remembering the significant - PNAS
Jun 10, 2013 · Much evidence indicates that emotional arousal enhances the storage of memories, thus serving to create, selectively, lasting memories of our more important ...
[6]
How (and Why) Emotion Enhances the Subjective Sense of ...
A growing body of evidence suggests emotion boosts memory accuracy to an extent but affects the subjective sense of recollection even more.
[7]
Freudian Repression, the Common View, and Pathological Science
This paper traces the development of Freud's theory of repression and compares this with the “common view” found in mainstream psychology: the motivated ...Freud's Early Theory Of... · Primal Repression And... · Freudian Repression And The...
[8]
7.5 Memory Processes: Encoding – Cognitive Psychology
From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that we would prioritize information relevant to our experiences over random and arbitrary pieces of information ...Encoding · Distinctiveness · Meaningful Context
[9]
The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory - PubMed Central
Aug 24, 2017 · Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving.
[10]
A circumplex model of affect. - APA PsycNet
A circumplex model of affect. Citation. Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161–1178.
[11]
A novel demonstration of enhanced memory associated ... - PubMed
Subjects viewing an emotionally arousing story showed enhanced memory and recalled more slides, especially when the emotional narration occurred, compared to ...
[12]
Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion - Sage Journals
We hypothesize that there is a general bias, based on both innatepredispositions and experience, in animals and humans, to give greater weight to negative ...
[13]
[PDF] Emotion Drives Attention: Detecting the Snake in the Grass
Fear-relevant pictures, like snakes, are found faster, and threatening stimuli, especially if emotionally provocative, capture attention automatically.Missing: 200- 300ms
[14]
Testing the snake-detection hypothesis: larger early posterior ...
It is well established that in humans the visual detection of snakes is faster than of other, less life-threatening stimuli (Öhman and Mineka, 2001; Öhman et al ...
[15]
Early visual processing of snakes and angry faces: An ERP study
Jan 1, 2018 · The EPN is a relative negativity over the occipital scalp that is usually maximal between 200–300 ms after stimulus onset and reflects early ...
[16]
The dot-probe task to measure emotional attention
Jan 13, 2017 · The dot-probe task measures attention to emotional stimuli, is implicit, requires minimal training, and shows attentional bias in both humans ...
[17]
Emotion and Cognition and the Amygdala: From “what is it?” to ...
In humans, spatial attention appeared to be enhanced towards emotional faces, as revealed by the dot-probe task, when participants performed the task while the ...
[18]
How Affective Arousal Influences Judgments, Learning, and Memory
In this review, we conclude that arousal can be both beneficial and detrimental to cognitive performance. The Yerkes-Dodson law (1908) specified an inverted U- ...
[19]
[PDF] Encoding details: Positive emotion leads to memory broadening
Jul 14, 2011 · The emotional content of an event can have profound effects on our ability to remember the specific details that make up that event (Dolcos,.Missing: themes | Show results with:themes
[20]
[PDF] Positive emotions enhance recall of peripheral details
Jun 4, 2008 · High arousal and negative affect enhance recall of central aspects of events. This statement has been supported by research in autobiographical.
[21]
[PDF] Emotional Arousal and Memory Binding
In this article, I review evidence for both arousal-impaired and arousal-enhanced memory binding and explain these contradictory findings using an object-based ...<|separator|>
[22]
Emotional enhancement of memory: how norepinephrine enables ...
May 13, 2010 · In this review we will consider at the level of changes in synaptic function how creation of long-lasting memories during emotional arousal ...
[23]
Fear Memory | Physiological Reviews | American Physiological Society
Below is a merged summary of the four segments on "Fear Memory Consolidation, Hippocampal LTP in Emotional Contexts, and Storage Differences." To retain all the detailed information in a dense and organized manner, I will use a combination of narrative text and a table in CSV format where appropriate. The narrative will provide an overview and context, while the table will capture specific details (e.g., brain regions, mechanisms, biochemical correlates, and references) for clarity and completeness.
[24]
BDNF is essential to promote persistence of long-term memory storage
Depending on the strength and/or saliency of the information to be remembered, consolidated LTMs can persist for just 24–48 h or for many days or weeks (4–6).
[25]
Emotional Modulation of Learning and Memory - PubMed Central
This long-term potentiation (LTP) of synaptic strength shares many characteristics with memory consolidation. ... synaptic plasticity and memory consolidation.
[26]
Memory Consolidation - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
... emotional memories, respectively. Cortical plasticity has been typically ... distributed storage, and retrieval of various associations generated by ...
[27]
[PDF] Some Facts About “Weapon Focus - University of Washington
Unfortunately, as Loftus (1979) and McCloskey and Egeth (1983) have noted, this study is far from a perfect test of the effects of the presence of a weapon.
[28]
(PDF) Mood and memory - ResearchGate
Describes experiments in which happy or sad moods were induced in Ss by hypnotic suggestion to investigate the influence of emotions on memory and thinking.Missing: original | Show results with:original
[29]
Mood-Congruent Memory Revisited - PMC - PubMed Central
Mood-congruent memory (MCM), a psychological phenomenon where emotional memory is biased towards content affectively congruent with a past or current mood.
[30]
Flashbulb memories - ScienceDirect.com
Flashbulb Memories are memories for the circumstances in which one first learned of a very surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event.
[31]
Emotional Memory in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder - Frontiers
Mar 4, 2019 · One PTSD symptom involving memory and emotional processing is intrusive memories that consist of involuntary images accompanied by a high level ...
[32]
The amygdala, the hippocampus, and emotional modulation of ...
The amygdala modulates memory in other regions like the hippocampus, and is a site for emotional memory. The amygdala's effect on the hippocampus may depend on ...
[33]
Two routes to emotional memory: Distinct neural processes ... - PNAS
Activation in the left amygdala and left hippocampus correlated with successful memory formation for the arousing words (Fig. 3). Furthermore, we found a ...
[34]
Emotion processing and the amygdala: from a 'low road' to 'many ...
We review anatomical and physiological data that argue against the notion that such a pathway plays a prominent part in processing affective visual stimuli in ...
[35]
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Encodes Emotional Value
Jul 3, 2013 · These results suggest that the vmPFC encodes a domain-general value signal that tracks the value of not only external rewards, but also emotional stimuli.
[36]
The role of dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex ... - Nature
Jan 21, 2021 · Our results suggest that the dlPFC is involved in control and regulation of valence of emotional experiences, while the vmPFC might be involved ...
[37]
Amygdalo-cortical dialogue underlies memory enhancement by ...
Mar 19, 2025 · Our findings indicate that inter-regional reactivation triggered by the amygdala during NREM sleep underlies emotion-induced perceptual memory enhancement.
[38]
Altered Effective Connectivity within the Fronto-Limbic Circuitry in ...
May 10, 2021 · The aim of this study is to investigate whether female pa- tients with MDD have disrupted effective connectivity of the fronto-limbic circuit ...<|separator|>
[39]
Basolateral amygdala activation enhances object recognition ...
May 27, 2022 · The basolateral amygdala is known to mediate emotional arousal effects on different forms of recognition memory via functional interactions ...
[40]
Arousal increases neural gain via the locus coeruleus ...
During an arousal response, the locus coeruleus (LC), a small nucleus in the brainstem, releases norepinephrine (NE) throughout most of the brain via its ...Missing: U- curve
[41]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8991985/
[42]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4462413/
[43]
Locus coeruleus: a new look at the blue spot - PMC - PubMed Central
The modulatory actions of NA on attentional processes follow an inverted-U-shaped curve, with optimal function at moderate NA doses, as was reported for working ...
[44]
The impact of stress and glucocorticoids on memory - PubMed Central
Chronic stress induces dysfunction of the HPA axis, leading to increased levels of glucocorticoids ... Autobiographic memory impairment following acute cortisol ...
[45]
HPA Axis Alterations in Mental Disorders: Impact on Memory and its ...
There is compelling evidence that stress and GCs affect learning and memory, with impairing effects on memory retrieval and enhancing effects on memory ...
[46]
Dopamine Release During Human Emotional Processing - PMC - NIH
In animals, dopamine is known to influence consolidation and retrieval of emotional memories (White and Viaud, 1991; Lamont and Kokkinidis, 1998; Greba et al., ...
[47]
The Role of Serotonin in Fear Learning and Memory - PubMed Central
Aug 12, 2023 · The serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) system is known to play a significant role in emotional and motivational aspects of human behavior, ...
[48]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4414918/
[49]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17352610/
[50]
The slow forgetting of emotional episodic memories - PubMed Central
Emotional events are remembered better than neutral events, and this emotion advantage becomes particularly pronounced over time. The time dependent effects ...<|separator|>
[51]
Adaptive memory: survival processing enhances retention - PubMed
James S Nairne ... These findings suggest that memory systems are "tuned" to remember information that is processed for fitness, perhaps as a result of survival ...
[52]
(PDF) Positive Emotion Enhances Association-Memory
Oct 9, 2025 · These findings align with previous research demonstrating that positive emotions, rather than negative ones, enhance memory for adjacent neutral ...<|separator|>
[53]
(PDF) Meta-Analysis of the Age-Related Positivity Effect
When reflecting on past events, older adults tend to recall more positive than negative information [63] . They also ruminate less about negative events [64,65] ...
[54]
Tunnel memories for autobiographical events: Central details are ...
The findings suggest that tunnel memories—enhanced memory for the central details of an event—are limited to emotionally negative memories. The findings ...
[55]
Tunnel memories for autobiographical events: central details are ...
The finding suggest that tunnel memories--enhanced memory for the central details of an event--are limited to emotionally negative memories.
[56]
Everything you ever wanted to know about the Think/No-Think task ...
Feb 20, 2024 · By using this procedure, the authors observed evidence of suppression effects (i.e., greater forgetting of No-Think memories with respect to ...
[57]
Emotional associative memory is disrupted by directed forgetting
Oct 10, 2023 · Here, we demonstrate that directed forgetting can also disrupt associative memories acquired through fear conditioning. In two experiments, ...
[58]
[PDF] you can't always think - what you want: problems - in the suppression
When individuals are asked to report their thoughts as they try not to think of a white bear, for instance, they indicate multiple occurrences of the thought ...
[59]
Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression: A Meta-Analysis
The ironic effect of thought suppression refers to the phenomenon in which individuals trying to rid their mind of a target thought ironically experience ...
[60]
[PDF] 1 TITLE Negative emotional events retroactively disrupt semantic ...
Here, we developed an emotional oddball task in which participants encoded lists of neutral words that were either semantically related to or unrelated to a.
[61]
Emotional learning retroactively promotes memory integration ... - eLife
Dec 8, 2022 · Emotional learning retroactively promotes memory integration for previously neutral events into episodic memory to foster future event ...
[62]
Advances in fear memory erasure and its neural mechanisms
This article reviews recent studies on fear memory erasure, erasure of short- and long-term memory, fear memory erasure and neuroplasticity.
[63]
Emotion and Autobiographical Memory - PMC - PubMed Central - NIH
In this article, we review the interactions between emotion and autobiographical memory, focusing on two broad ways in which these interactions occur.
[64]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2483789/
[65]
[PDF] Hot-Cold Empathy Gaps and Medical Decision Making
Finally, interpersonal hot-cold empathy gaps occur when one predicts, or tries to make sense of, the behavior of another person who is in an affective state ...Missing: misattribution | Show results with:misattribution
[66]
Adherence to emotion norms is greater in individualist cultures than ...
It is generally assumed that there is greater pressure to conform to social norms in collectivist cultures than in individualist cultures.
[67]
The Neural Bases of Emotion Regulation: Reappraisal and ...
Reappraisal resulted in early (0−4.5s) prefrontal cortical (PFC) responses, decreased negative emotion experience, and decreased amygdala and insular responses.
[68]
Cognitive Reappraisal of Emotion: A Meta-Analysis of Human ...
Cognitive reappraisal changes how one thinks about a stimulus to change its emotional impact, targeting the appraisal stage of emotion generation.
[69]
Internally Generated Displays of Craving Suppression Predict ... - NIH
Research on emotion suppression has shown a rebound effect, in which expression of the targeted emotion increases following a suppression attempt.
[70]
Neural Mechanisms of Extinction Learning and Retrieval - PMC
Extinction occurs in three phases: acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval, each of which depends on specific structures (amygdala, prefrontal cortex, ...Missing: seminal | Show results with:seminal
[71]
Neurobiological Changes Induced by Mindfulness and Meditation
Nov 15, 2024 · This review highlights that mindfulness, particularly through MBSR, improves emotional regulation and brain structure, reduces anxiety, and enhances stress ...
[72]
Emotion regulation during encoding reduces negative and ...
These results suggest that applying emotion regulation techniques during encoding may provide an effective approach toward altering dysfunctional memory in ...
[73]
The Effect of Cognitive Reappraisal on the Emotional Memory Trade ...
Reappraisal at encoding reduced the likelihood that the negative object would be remembered and increased the likelihood that the surrounding background would ...
[74]
A systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental methods for ...
Aug 21, 2024 · Results showed that techniques (behavioural, pharmacological, neuromodulation) significantly reduced intrusion frequency.
[75]
The Moderating Role of Emotion Regulation in the Recall of ... - MDPI
Jul 2, 2021 · Based on the previous literature [11,16,17,18,54,55], we expected events with higher emotional intensity to be recalled with greater vividness.
[76]
Parallel Regulation of Memory and Emotion Supports the ...
Jul 5, 2017 · We found that the better people were at suppressing intrusions, the more it reduced their emotional responses to suppressed images. These dual ...
[77]
Mechanisms of Memory Disruption in Depression - PMC - NIH
Jan 10, 2018 · Depressed individuals typically show poor memory for positive events, potentiated memory for negative events, and impaired recollection.
[78]
Heightened familiarity drives the negative retrieval bias in depression
Jun 20, 2025 · Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is associated with emotional memory deficits, but treatment is limited by a poor understanding of the mechanisms ...
[79]
Rumination as a Mechanism Linking Cognitive Biases to Depressive ...
We found consistent evidence that rumination mediates the relationship between interpretation and memory biases and depressive symptoms.
[80]
Brain mechanisms of rumination and negative self-referential ...
Dec 1, 2024 · Rumination may be an important mechanism by which negative self-concept and affective memory biases are linked to depression. Rumination refers ...
[81]
Structural and functional changes in the hippocampus induced by ...
Jan 1, 2025 · In conclusion, chronic stress significantly affects hippocampal structure and function, resulting in atrophy and reduced neurogenesis, which ...
[82]
Neural mechanisms underlying cognitive impairment in depression ...
Jan 5, 2025 · This study reviews neural mechanisms underlying cognitive impairment in depression and identifies associated activation abnormalities in brain regions.
[83]
Affective Working Memory in Depression - PMC - PubMed Central
The results showed that, overall, WM capacity was more impaired in the context of negative distractor images, relative to neutral images.Abstract · Method · Discussion
[84]
Do cognitive biases prospectively predict anxiety and depression? A ...
Jan 31, 2025 · These findings support the predictive role of cognitive biases in anxiety and depression, with interpretation and memory biases emerging as key markers.
[85]
Attention and Interpretation Bias Modification Transfers to Memory ...
Mar 25, 2024 · This study delves into the combined cognitive bias hypothesis in depression, exploring the interaction between negative attention, interpretation and memory ...
[86]
Prior sleep timing and visual recognition of emotional faces in 6 ...
Infants showed recognition for the sad and angry faces when tested in the awake condition, but not in the nap condition. This suggests that timing of prior ...
[87]
Neural Correlates of Facial Emotion Processing in Infancy - PMC
The current results suggest the detection of a fearful face in infants' brain can happen shortly (~200 – 290 ms) after the stimulus onset, and this process may ...
[88]
A learning theory of attachment: Unraveling the black box of ...
They argued that attachment IWMs reflect memories of attachment-related experiences that are organized according to generalized event schemata. The schemata ...
[89]
Infant bonding and attachment to the caregiver: Insights from basic ...
The bonding and early life attachment between the infant and caregiver is a dynamic, bidirectional process involving caregiver nurturing of the infant.
[90]
Effects of Emotional Valence and Concreteness on Children's ...
Dec 3, 2020 · The findings suggest that the memory accuracy of 7- and 8-year-old children is influenced by emotional information, particularly for abstract words.
[91]
Effects of stress on 6- and 7-year-old children's emotional memory ...
6–7-year-old children show worse memory for low arousing negative items relative to neutral and positive items. · Girls had higher cortisol secretion in response ...
[92]
[PDF] Children show heightened memory for threatening social actions
Jan 28, 2012 · The negativity bias during early childhood may aid children in avoiding situations where threatening social actions are likely to occur even ...
[93]
Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social ...
Adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.
[94]
Stress Physiology and Memory for Emotional Information
Among girls with lower pubertal hormone levels, greater cortisol reactivity was associated with enhanced memory for negative information. Among boys with higher ...
[95]
The relationship between pubertal hormones and brain plasticity
Adolescence may mark a sensitive period for the development of higher-order cognition through enhanced plasticity of cortical circuits.
[96]
Changes in Traumatic Memories and Posttraumatic Cognitions ...
Apr 4, 2019 · We tentatively suggest problematic, overly sensory and incoherent quality of traumatic memories may be a useful target in the treatment of PTSD ...
[97]
The neurobiological profile of traumatized adolescents - ScienceDirect
Trauma-related disorders are debilitating psychiatric conditions that affect people who have directly or indirectly witnessed adversities.
[98]
Fostering socio-emotional learning through early childhood ...
May 22, 2021 · Early childhood SEL skills develop rapidly, are uniquely malleable, and are strongly associated with later social, academic, cognitive, and ...
[99]
Early childhood trauma and its long-term impact on cognitive ... - NIH
Jul 29, 2025 · The purpose of this study is to identify and synthesize studies that investigate the association between early childhood trauma and cognitive ...Table 2 · Cognitive Outcomes · Figure 3
[100]
Could the impact of emotional states on learning in children vary ...
Academic performance, especially, memory retention and recall, has been shown to be influenced by the emotions experienced by children and adolescents.
[101]
Meta-analysis of the age-related positivity effect - PubMed
The age-related positivity effect is a bias where older adults show a preference for positive information, while younger adults show the opposite.
[102]
[PDF] Amygdala Responses to Emotionally Valenced Stimuli in Older and ...
With age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. METHOD.
[103]
Effects of Aging on Functional Connectivity of the Amygdala for ...
Functional connectivity of the amygdala with the rest of the brain was consistent with age-related reductions in memory for negative stimuli: Older adults ...
[104]
Emotion processing in the aging brain is modulated by semantic ...
This study provides novel evidence that differences in valence processing are modulated by elaboration: relative to YAs, OAs show enhanced activity in the ...
[105]
Depressive symptoms are associated with reduced positivity ... - NIH
With increasing depressive symptoms in older age, positivity preferences were reduced, manifesting as improvements in negative memory. The neural data ...
[106]
Subclinical depressive symptoms and job stress differentially impact ...
Jan 25, 2025 · We extend this finding to show that even subclinical levels of depressive symptoms can reduce the positivity bias in memory reported in aging. ...
[107]
Emotional memory consolidation during sleep is associated with ...
In young adults, negative emotional memory consolidation during sleep is associated with slow-wave sleep (SWS), suggesting a shared mechanism with neutral ...
[108]
Awake ripples enhance emotional memory encoding in the human ...
Jan 3, 2024 · Enhanced memory for emotional experiences is hypothesized to depend on amygdala-hippocampal interactions during memory consolidation.
[109]
The role of REM sleep theta activity in emotional memory - PubMed
Oct 1, 2015 · A growing body of research on humans and animals provide behavioral evidence for a role of REM sleep in the strengthening and modulation of emotional memories.
[110]
Slow-wave sleep and REM sleep differentially contribute to memory ...
Oct 1, 2025 · Additionally, theta (4-7 Hz) and beta (15-25 Hz) power during REM sleep were positively associated with these memory representational ...
[111]
Preferential Consolidation of Emotionally Salient Information During ...
Daytime naps and nocturnal sleep enhance this emotional memory trade-off effect, with memory for emotional components correlated with slow wave sleep (SWS) ...Missing: recall | Show results with:recall
[112]
Sleep-dependent engram reactivation during hippocampal memory ...
Apr 19, 2024 · We labeled context-encoding engram neurons in the hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG) and assessed reactivation of these neurons after fear learning.
[113]
The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Function - PMC
Moreover, accumulated sleep loss leads to an amplification of negative emotions in response to disruptive daytime experiences, while blunting the affective ...
[114]
The categorical effect of negative emotion on memory before and ...
These findings suggest that sleep loss disrupts both encoding and retrieval processes, with a potentially selective preservation of memory for emotionally ...
[115]
Role of sleep for encoding of emotional memory - ScienceDirect.com
The present study demonstrates that capabilities to encode pictures deteriorate after total sleep deprivation (TSD), but not after selective REM sleep ...
[116]
Impaired emotional memory and decision-making following...
A study by Thomas et al showed that, after 24 hours of sleep deprivation, there is a significant decrease in metabolic activity in the prefrontal cortex, ...2.3 Emotional Memory Task · 3 Results · 4 Discussion And Conclusions<|separator|>
[117]
Haunted by the past: old emotions remain salient in insomnia disorder
Apr 25, 2019 · Sleep may on the other hand also favour increased amygdala responses in association with improved recall or discerning emotional from neutral ...Missing: heightened | Show results with:heightened
[118]
Insomnia, anxiety and related disorders: a systematic review on ...
In particular, insomnia is associated with reduced slow wake sleep and diminished sleep-related consolidation of memories (for an overview see (Palagini and ...
[119]
Two nights of recovery sleep restores hippocampal connectivity but ...
May 29, 2020 · These findings suggest that more than two nights of recovery sleep are needed to fully restore memory function and hippocampal-memory associations after one ...Missing: catch- | Show results with:catch-
[120]
A systematic and meta-analytic review of the impact of sleep ...
Sleep restriction impairs both memory encoding and memory consolidation. •. Short sleep can impair memory to a similar degree as not sleeping at all. •.
[121]
The Relationship Between Poor Sleep and Memory Impairment ...
Oct 18, 2024 · Shift work implies a significant amount of sleep deprivation, which often results in circadian rhythm disturbances and memory impairment.
[122]
Does sleep change the emotional bias in memory in older adults?
Jul 24, 2025 · Despite age-related changes in sleep and memory, sleep-dependent negative emotional memory may be preserved in some older adult samples.
[123]
Does sleep change the emotional bias in memory in older adults?
Jul 24, 2025 · Sleep supports the consolidation of emotional memories. Young adults exhibit a bias towards consolidation of negative memories during sleep ...Missing: offset | Show results with:offset
[124]
Sleep's contribution to memory formation | Physiological Reviews
Oct 15, 2025 · The decline in sleep quality with aging, particularly of slow-wave sleep, contributes to memory impairments, emphasizing the need for targeted ...