LISA A. TOBLER

EMOTION, STRESS AND MEMORY

READING

• Chapter 7• Presentation

GORDON H. BOWER MOOD AND COGNITION RESEARCH

1. Memory for past events

2. Learning

3. Higher Order Functions

  * Free associations

  * Fantasies/Imagination

  * Snap judgments

  * Event likelihood

  * Social impressions 

* Self judgment

STATE DEPENDENT MEMORY AND MOOD CONGRUENT LEARNING

State-Dependent Memory: How mood helps/hurts retrieval of things that are already there.

  

Mood-Congruent Learning: How mood affects the way in which new information is brought into memory.

MOOD-CONGRUENT PROCESSING

• A person’s mood can sensitize the person to take in mainly information that agrees with that mood.

• Material that is congruent with the mood becomes salient so that the person attends to it more deeply.

• The person thinks about that material more deeply and associates it more richly with other information (something called associative elaboration).

• This results in the person learning the material better than non-mood-congruent material.

STATE DEPENDENT MEMORY

Memory associated with an emotional state will be easier to retrieve when you are in that same emotional state.

•Example: Learn FACT A when happy, easier to remember FACT A when happy.

 

Memory associated with an emotional state will be harder to retrieve when you are in an opposed emotional state.

•Example: Learn FACT A when happy, harder to remember FACT A when sad.

CONTEXT-DEPENDENT MEMORY

• Improved recall when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same.

SCUBA DIVER STUDY

Learn on

Land

Learn Under

Water

Recall on Land

Good

Poor

Recall Under Water

Poor

Good

BOWER STATE DEPENDENT MEMORY STUDY

1. Ss learn 16 words in happy mood, then later Ss

learn 16 words in a sad mood

2. Ss come back some time later

3. Ss placed in either a happy or a sad mood

4. Ss asked to recall words from "happy" list and from

"sad" list.

LEARNING AND RECALL IN SAME/DIFFERENT MOODS (PERCENT RECALLED)

1. 16 words when happy

Learn 16 words when sad

2. Placed in happy or sad mood.

3. Asked to recall words from happy/sad list

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

Recall Happy Recall Sad

Perce

nt Re

called

Learn HappyLearn Sad

NUMBER OF HAPPY AND SAD MEMORIES REMEMBERED BY HAPPY AND SAD SUBJECTSRecall happy/sad memories

a.Mood induced by thinking positive/negative thoughts

b.Ss report life events of past week

c.Judges (blind) rate events as positive/negative

d.How does induced mood affect personal memory?

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Sad Event Happy Event

Perc

ent R

ecal

led

Recall HappyRecall Sad

HOW STATE DEPENDENT MEMORY WORKS

The Associative Network Model of Memory

• Mind organizes memories, learning around central themes.

• What’s in your house? vs. What’s in bedroom, kitchen?

•Emotions work as organizing themes.

•Provide memory clues: Expressions, actions, arousal, ideas..

•Mood state determines the kind of “organizer” available

•Happy mood: Happy things available, sad things are not

•Sad mood: Sad things available, happy things are not

TIME SPENT LOOKING AT HAPPY/SAD SCENESBY HAPPY/SAD SUBJECTS

1. Ss look are in happy/sad moods

2. Ss look at happy or sad pictures.

3. How long (in seconds) Ss spend looking at happy/sad pictures.

6

6.5

7

7.5

8

8.5

9

9.5

10

Sad Scene Happy Scene

Seco

nds V

iewing

Pictu

res

Sad MoodHappy Mood

NUMBER OF HAPPY/SAD SCENES RECALLED BY SS WHO STUDY SCENES IN HAPPY/SAD MOOD

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Happy Scene Sad Scene

Perc

ent R

ecal

led

Happy Mood

Sad Mood

NUMBER OF HAPPY/SAD STORY INCIDENTS RECALLED BY SS WHO READ STORY IN

HAPPY/SAD MOOD

5

5.5

6

6.5

7

7.5

8

8.5

9

Sad Scene Happy Scene

Num

ber R

ecal

led

Sad MoodHappy Mood

PROBABILITY OF RECALLING A PROMPT BECAUSE OF STRENGTH OF EMOTION GENERATED BY THE

MEMORY ASSOCIATED TO THE PROMPT

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Intensity Rating

PROCEDURE FOR EMOTIONAL INTENSITY AND LEARNING STUDY: SESSION 1

a. Subjects are hypnotized

b. Ss trained to evoke three different levels of

either happy, sad, or angry

PROCEDURE FOR EMOTIONAL INTENSITY AND LEARNING STUDY: SESSION 2

a. Ss access mood they were trained to evoke

b. Imagine self in 4 happy scenes, 4 sad scenes, 4 angry scenes narrated to Ss by the experimenter

1. At emotion level 1 (lowest)

2. At emotion level 2 ( middle)

3. At emotion level 3 (highest)

c. Shift to neutral mood

d. Remove from hypnotic trance

e. Filler task for 5 minutes

f. Free recall of gist of episodes

AVERAGE FREE-RECALL OF HAPPY, ANGRY, SAD EPISODES BY HAPPY, ANGRY, SAD SUBJECTS

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

55

60

Happy Episode Angry Episode Sad Episode

HappyAngrySad

AVERAGE FREE-RECALL FOR EPISODES UNDER LOW, MEDIUM, OR HIGH INTENSITY

EMOTION

20253035404550556065

Low Intensity

MediumIntensity

High Intensity

HappyAngrySad

MOOD AND VISUAL PROCESSING

MOOD AND VISUAL PROCESSING

• Happy: More global, see “big picture”

• Sad: More local, focus on the details.

STRESS AND MEMORY

• Cortisol affects memory formation and retrieval• Have you ever forgotten something during a

stressful situation that you should have remembered?

• Cortisol also interferes with the function of neurotransmitters.

• Excessive cortisol can make it difficult to think or retrieve long-term memories.

• That's why people get befuddled and confused in a severe crisis. Their mind goes blank because "the lines are down." They can't remember where the fire exit is, for example.

STRESS AND MEMORY

• Why do we lose our memory when we are stressed?

• Stress hormones divert blood glucose to exercising muscles, therefore the amount of glucose – hence energy – that reaches the brain's hippocampus is diminished.

• This creates an energy crisis in the hippocampus which compromises its ability to create new memories.

• That may be why some people can't remember a very traumatic event, and why short-term memory is usually the first casualty of age-related memory loss resulting from a lifetime of stress.

CORTISOL AND TEMPORARY MEMORY LOSS STUDY

• In an animal study, rats were stressed by an electrical shock, and then made to go through a maze that they were already familiar with. When the shock was given either four hours before or two minutes before navigating the maze, the rats had no problem. But, when they were stressed by a shock 30 minutes before, the rats were unable to remember their way through the maze.

CORTISOL AND TEMPORARY MEMORY LOSS STUDY

• This time-dependent effect on memory performance correlates with the levels of circulating cortisol, which are highest at 30 minutes. The same thing happened when non-stressed rats were injected with cortisol. In contrast, when cortisol production was chemically suppressed, then there were no stress-induced effects on memory retrieval.

CORTISOL AND TEMPORARY MEMORY LOSS STUDY

• According to James McGaugh, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, "This effect only lasts for a couple of hours, so that the impairing effect in this case is a temporary impairment of retrieval. The memory is not lost. It is just inaccessible or less accessible for a period of time."

CORTISOL AND THE DEGENERATIVE CASCADE

• Normally, in response to stress, the adrenals secrete cortisol.

• When levels of cortisol rise to a certain level, several areas of the brain – especially the hippocampus – tell the hypothalamus to turn off the cortisol-producing mechanism. This is the proper feedback response.

• The hippocampus is the area most damaged by cortisol. Older people often have lost 20-25% of the cells in their hippocampus, so it cannot provide proper feedback to the hypothalamus, so cortisol continues to be secreted. This, in turn, causes more damage to the hippocampus, and even more cortisol production. Thus, a Catch-22 "degenerative cascade" begins, which can be very difficult to stop.

CORTISOL AND BRAIN DEGENERATION STUDY

• Studies show that lots of stress or exposure to cortisol accelerates the degeneration of the aging hippocampus.

• And, because the hippocampus is part of the feedback mechanism that signals when to stop cortisol production, a damaged hippocampus causes cortisol levels to get out of control – further compromising memory and cognitive function.

• The cycle of degeneration then continues. (Perhaps similar to the deterioration of the pancreas-insulin feedback system.)