Remembering Emotional Events: A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

Abstract

Abstract How we respond emotionally to the peaks and valleys of life reveals much about who we are now, who we have been, and has implications for who we could be in the future. The question of how we remember these emotional events is thus of central importance to understanding human experience, and is the subject of this chapter. In addressing this question, our goals are to understand the specific neurocognitive mechanisms that preserve records of significant experiences, the motivational and contextual factors that influence their operation, and what their interaction tells us about the relationship between memory and emotion more generally. We begin with a brief historical sketch of previous approaches to emotion and memory and then move to our own multileveled social cognitive neuroscience approach. We then apply this approach to understanding how the emotional nature of an event influences the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information about it. We conclude with suggestions for ways in which a social cognitive neuroscience approach can guide future research. Most investigations of emotion and memory have begun with the same question: How do we remember emotionally evocative events? But investigators have framed this question differently and, as a result, have reached different conclusions. Three approaches have dominated past research, and the strengths and weaknesses of each are rooted in the ways in which their questions have been posed. Debate over whether emotional memories, and especially traumatic ones, are remembered poorly or well has a long history and is central to current discussion about the recovery of supposedly repressed memories of sexual and physical abuse during childhood (for discussion, see Conway, 1997; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994; Schacter, 1996). The question of whether emotion improves or impairs memory often is framed in terms of the question of whether emotional memories are indelible or reconstructed. Debate concerning this issue has played out in three different arenas.