Emotional Psychology Psychology Essay Research Paper

Emotional Psychology: Effect of Emotions on Memory
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Emotional Psychology: Effect of Emotions on Memory
As human beings go through the motion of life, they experience different emotions, starting from an early age. This is because human beings have different experiences at different periods of their lives which require certain responses. Emotions are strong feelings and there is no one way of defining emotions. As indicated by Tyng, Amin, Saad, and Malik (2017), emotions are “a complex set of interactions between subjective and objective variables that are mediated by neural and hormonal systems, which can (a) give rise to affective experiences of emotional valence (pleasure-displeasure) and emotional arousal (high-low activation/calming-arousing);(b) generate cognitive processes such as emotionally relevant perceptual affect, appraisals, labeling processes; (c) activate widespread psychological and physiological changes to the arousing conditions; and (d) motivate behavior that is often but not always expressive, goal-directed and adaptive.” Basically, emotions can be described as a subjective and affective state with varying intensity and are usually preceded by the occurrence of an event.
Psychologists have often linked memories to the emotional state of human beings at the time the memories were being made, more so in cases involving negative emotions. Individuals who have experienced traumatic events may forget some or all the details about the event, especially if the traumatic event happens in childhood. Tyng, Amin, Saad, and Malik (2017), indicate that in human beings, emotions have a considerable effect on the cognitive processes such as attention, reasoning, and memory, among others. The aim of the paper is to investigate how emotions affect memory and our ability to retrieve stored memories. To this end, a literature review will be conducted to establish what past studies have revealed about the relationship between emotions and the ability to create and recall memories. Then, this paper will discuss how the studies support the current hypothesis and suggest a new research direction.
Hypothesis
H0: A person’s emotional state when an event occurs does not affect their ability to memorize and/or recall the details of the event.
H1: A person’s emotional state when an event occurs affects their ability to memorize and/or recall the details of the event.
Literature Review
Understanding emotions and their effect on the memory of human beings is important to psychologists. As stated earlier, emotions affect cognitive processes. Also, when psychologists understand emotions, they are in a better position to understand human motivation and the behavior of human beings based on their different experiences throughout their life. This is why there have been multiple studies on emotions and how the processing of emotions affects cognition, motivation, and physical body changes, albeit temporary (Dalgleish, 2004). Understanding emotions as a key aspect of human behavior will also allow psychologists to guide human beings through different experiences.
In a study investigating how emotional content affects working memory capacity, Garrison and Schmeichel (2018) conducted an experiment with three hundred and twelve participants. The participants were asked to fill a questionnaire and also take a test that measured the working memory capacity. Specifically, this test measured the ability of individuals to keep information in the short term memory. This test was in two versions. The first version was neutral and words that do not elicit any emotions were used. The second version was emotional and words that elicit negative and positive emotions were used. The participants were randomly selected to either complete the neutral version or the emotional version test. The researchers then added all the words that were perfectly recalled and this summation was used as the test scores. The results of the study indicated that participants who completed the emotional version test had lower scores than those who completed the neutral version test. Thus, the working memory capacity was affected by emotions because it was lower among the emotional version test participants. Also, in the emotional version test, the researchers investigated the ability to recall negative and positive words. The results indicate these participants recalled negative words more than the positive words. These results indicate that emotions affect the memory of an individual as they reduce the working memory capacity. This means that while the brain is performing other operations, the presence of emotional content affects the ability of the brain to store and update memories. These results are very crucial for this paper because, in support of H1, they indicate that indeed, the emotional state an individual is in at the time an event occurs affects their ability to store the memories and update them in the long term memory. This is to say that when a person is not experiencing any emotions as an event is happening, they can easily store and even recall specific, minor details about the event in question.
In a similar effort to establish the relationship between emotions and memory, Selle, Verschuere, Kindt, Meijer, Nahari, and Ben-Shakhar (2017) conducted two experiments to investigate how emotional stimuli affects memory. There were one hundred and thirty-six participants in total and the researchers performed the Concealed Information Test (CIT), which is used to detect whether individuals have a memory of a crime-related event. In experiment 1, the participants completed a CIT that involved exposure to negative arousing or negative non-arousing pictures. In this experiment, the test was done immediately or delayed for one week after exposure to the pictures. As a result, the participants in this experiment were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions namely; arousing immediate, arousing delayed, non-arousing immediate, and non-arousing delayed. In experiment 2 the test on the participants was done one week after exposure to a series of neutral and negative arousing pictures. The results of the study indicated that in experiment 1, partic...