A team of scientists from New York University (NYU) discovered that emotions can have hangover effects on memory performance. Dr. Lila Davachi from the university's Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science defines emotion as a state of mind that can have a long-lasting influence on cognitive processes. When an individual is emotionally aroused, the experience can thus impact his ability to attend to or remember events that occur afterwards, even for things that are not emotional.
Dr. Davachi and her team discovered in their study that participants had better memory performance on non-emotional events after experiencing something emotional. This implies that people who are exposed to something that invokes their emotions experience changes that promotes better long-term recall of subsequent items.
Brain scans have also supported this view. A technological device called the functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, that measures brain activity shows that brain states remain unchanged for 20 to 30 minutes after an emotion experience. This can alter the way people process and remember future non-emotional events. Consequently, Dr. Davachi and her team supports the idea that experiencing emotions can have after-effects, something like an emotional hangover!
Category(s):Emotional Abuse
Source material from Science Daily
