Emotional Memory

Amy Fleischer
Blog: Emotional Memory
March 2, 2008

It seems like an important rule for this week’s readings is that change is the only constant. While emphasizing the integrative functions of different types of memory, we’ve learned about how we reconstruct our memories of the past by recalling them in the present. By use of our imaginations, we are constantly making our worlds through a complex interplay of memory and emotion. Since there are so many ways in which we re-make or create via memory, a thorough investigation the variety of processes is in order.

Part of our readings reviewed material we discussed in class last week. I found the repetition to be helpful, so what follows is another attempt to summarize:

In Memory and Emotion, McGaugh distinguishes between short-term (working) memory and long-term (lasting) memory. The former contains our most recent experiences, while the latter involves explicit recall of specific events (episodic) or factual knowledge (semantic) (10). He goes on to explain that there are, in fact, many different forms of memory as a result of integrated functioning between the hippocampus, caudate nucleus, and amygdala (28 fig3).

One of McGaugh’s softer points on the function of emotion regards how we use it to make meaning (2). Continuing last week’s discussion of narrative, the study of memory is important to scientists as well as historians for obvious reasons. A major debate existing in the field of oral history, in particular, is how much “honesty” counts when an altered memory could speak more for the truth. That is, with greater attention to context, narrated events may tell more about the meaning of historical events (be they individual/autobiographical or public) than would dry recollections of facts. The creative components of memory lend artistic impulses to research methods in history and science, as well as many other disciplines.

Of course, McGaugh and LeDoux and many others still insist on the value of objective analysis in the study of memory (McGaugh 7); but if researchers are too adamant about achieving objectivity, they may miss out on some important points. McGaugh’s critique of Pavlov’s experiments as being flat-out wrong was surprising to me… although his study was extremely important to behavioral studies, his inferences about conditioning as mere habit formation is misleading. In reading LeDoux as well, I was interested to learn about the historical abhorrence to psychological explanations of animal behavior (147). Hopefully, this denial of subjective emotional states in animals is now being checked. (Do you think that it is in the studies we have reviewed?)

I got kind of lost, in Chapter 7 of The Emotional Brain, where LeDoux describes the relationship between the hippocampus and the amygdala. I understand that explicit memories of emotional experiences (which are declarative or conscious) occur via the hippocampus and implicit emotional memories (which are procedural or skill-based) occur via the amygdala- but there still must be connections among them (181). Could it be that memories are all made of the same “stuff” but that this “stuff” functions differently in different regions of the brain? Depending also on various experiences?

By trying to remember an event with respect to time, it might be easier to compare how the two additional studies that we read examine the role of emotional memory. The Sharot, et al. article refers to earlier stages of memory formation in order to learn how memories are made, while Dolcos et al. looks more to the current situation in order to examine how memories are re-constituted over time. In both studies, mapping the consolidation of memory can provide valuable insights into the learning process.

Meanwhile, several of our readings referred to the experience of “memory without remembering” (McGaugh 46). The most classic example is in the case of H.M., but who among us can attest to a type of deja-vu experience, wherein something triggers the sense that we are re-experiencing a past event? Perhaps this is an exaggerated example of the way emotion affects the experience of “remembering”, as opposed to “knowing”, which is the topic of the study by Sharot, Delago and Phelps. (If this connection only makes sense to me, it is likely that I’ve misunderstood the study. Therefore, please help!)

The work of Dolcos, LeBar, and Cabeza places great emphasis on retrieval mechanisms for good reason. In addition to the assigned readings, I recommend listening to the Radio Lab on Memory and Forgetting (June 8, 2007). See the link on our course website and play close attention to the part about LeDoux’s research assistant who discovered that he could intervene in the process of remembering learned behavior (in rats) in order to erase specific, negative memories. (Sound familiar? Remember that movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? It was made a few years after the study!) Consider the implications for treatment of PTSD and other affective disorders… Accordingly, McGaugh reminds us how our ability to forget is also important, even at the level of every-day operations (8).

In the words of Radio Lab’s moderator, do not forget that emotional memory refers to the “physical structure” of brain cells… and so I keep thinking of emotional memory like a kind of cement, which helps to secure blocks of experience- although the structure is always open to remodeling.

Emotional memory is like a muscle that gets stronger when flexed, but might snap if over-extended. Just like muscles (which help to hold our bodies together) emotions act like a kind of glue, or binding agent, at the site of relationships between (or within) people, things, and ideas.


(Since this topic is prone to anecdotes, be glad I spared you the load! So many scattered memories have come flooding back while reading about this topic. Has this also been the case for you?)

The Scent of Bitter Almonds

Oliver Edwards

The Scent of Bitter Almonds

 

            We are all familiar with the phenomenon of a seemingly neutral stimulus becoming a catalyst for strong, vivid emotional memory. Our sensory modalities, especially the olfactory, have a remarkable ability to construct emotional cues for our long-term memory using all the sensory information that becomes associated with an emotional event. The McGaugh reading, more than any other, has helped me to clarify scientifically some of these ideas in a way that had previously only made sense to me in the literary realm.

            In the LeDoux reading we have been geared up for his unfolding expertise on the structure of fear conditioning, and he has just now begun to discuss how fear memories are formed. It seems, however, that we get a clearer picture from the generalized viewpoint taken by McGaugh. He walks us through the origins of emotional neuroscience, emphasizing important points about many of the misconceptions we have and the false starts in the history of neuroscience.

            I was very interested in and surprised at the section on Pavlov. First of all, it is important to note that Pavlov did not want to be considered a psychologist, that he considered the largely introspective field of psychology to be unscientific. He therefore considered himself purely a physiologist. This is ironic considering that he is a household name in psychology. More importantly, McGaugh points out that Pavlov was fundamentally wrong in that he supposed memory to be a direct Stimulus Response habit formation. Perhaps in an overzealous attempt to be more objective and avoid the anthropomorphization of his dogs, he supposed their memories to be, not only mechanistic, but simplistically hard wired to act directly based on stimulus response.

            McGaugh guides us gracefully through the research that has picked this theory apart, proving that animals and humans have mechanisms for forming memories that are more dynamic, and thus determining which brain areas allow us to do this. He then goes on to discuss memory consolidation, illustrating the phenomenon of delay memory formation. This has enormous implications for the understanding of how rich, emotionally potent memories can be associated with varying stimuli. He posits that memory consolidation takes a long time because it could be evolutionarily adaptive to allow a variety of sensory input to influence the memory, and everything surrounding the emotional event must be absorbed into the memory. This may just bring science closer to the mystery of how bitter almonds could make one think of unrequited love.

 

Emotion and Memory

Maggie Fenwood

The Feeling Brain

3/2/08

Week 7: Memory and Emotion

I have to say that it took me a little longer to get through these readings because of my limited knowledge on the structures of the brain but it was interesting to learn exactly where exactly in the brain these functions of memory take place. These readings were good for understanding where the current stance on memory and emotion evolved from, with a shift away from stimulus-response and purely behavioral explanations. Mostly focusing on amygdala and the medial temporal lobe Dolcos, LaBar and Cabeza looked at the memory-enhancing effect of emotional stimuli. Although they were looking at recollection from only one year later it did show the way in which retrieval activity for emotional and neutral pictures differs in favor of emotional stimuli enhancing the ability of the participant to remember it. Furthermore, they were looking for a distinction between knowing and remembering. This seems like a difficult thing to try to test, which they did in terms of activation in the brain. In the fMRI scans they found that the region of the medial temporal lobe may be sensitive to the reinstatement of sensory details but the hippocampus is critical for binding content and context in order to distinguish between knowing and remembering. As such, Dolcos et. al. conclude: “the Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Entorhinal Cortex all contribute to the enhancing effect of emotion on retrieval processes and only the first two regions can additionally differentiate between emotion effects on recollection and familiarity” (p. 6). So, the emotional content of the neural stimulus is important to retention and recollection although it might just be a memory-enhancing effect rather than a familiarity. This makes a distinction between remembering a stimulus in the form of an emotion-evoking picture and actually being familiar with or having knowledge of the picture in some other context. It is interesting to consider the degree to which the participants were exposed; although the stimulus was emotional it obviously would not be enough to traumatize them. So, in the case of someone who has PTSD it is even more so a familiarity than just a remembering of the event. The level of context and content play a very important role in the level of emotion and recollection in this sense. It would be interesting to know if any of the participants had other associations with the pictures that also enhanced their memory of the emotional pictures.

I thought that LeDoux’s chapters pointed out some interesting things about fear response, thinking about it in an evolutionary sense, as a mechanism for conditioning a response that is quick and long lasting. The fear stimulus only needs to occur a relatively limited number of times in order for the conditioned response to kick in. Where the declarative memory, in this sense, was developed for the preferential retention of information associated with motivational goals, emotional arousal can also enhance encoding and consolidation of memories that in an evolutionary sense are part of survival. So, learned, defensive behavior comes from fear response and the conditioned fear response involves unconscious or implicit processes. This multiplicity of memory is something that LeDoux talks about in terms of the brain having different systems which mediate different kinds of memory. The area that mediates explicit or declarative memory is different from the areas for classical conditioning or implicit learning. For example, the woman whose doctor pricked her with the tack in his hand, obviously she remembered that a negative stimulus came from shaking the man’s hand but she could not attribute any explicit knowledge to this fear condition. It seems as though these systems work with each other but are not dependent on one another. LeDoux states that the multiplicity of memory idea was obvious because of the role of the hippocampus, where information is transferred from the perceptual cortical sensory system and into the conceptual domain of the brain. So, it makes sense that researchers would not be looking for these things in non-human animals per se, because the animals they were testing could do most memory tasks without the hippocampus, it didn’t seem relevant. Now it seems as though the hippocampus plays a very important role in what goes beyond purely behavioral aspects of memory. The emotional aspect of memory is wrapped up in the way it is conceptualized and consolidated in the mind.

McGaugh makes a good point in saying that memory is not only the lasting consequence of experience but it is also what we learn from that experience. Once researchers were able to figure out that memory was a separate from the physicality of it, (i.e. a paralyzed rat still remembering the maze route) that was the key to understanding memory as a system with multiple methods of learning and ways of remembering. As such, McGaugh explains that slow development and consolidation of memory allows for recollection of detail and strength of memory. As an evolutionary adaptation implicit memory allows for us to learn new things constantly. Lasting memories are not formed instantly just like poorly learned material is quickly forgotten like learning an instrument takes practice. We are not simply conditioned to live in reaction to stimulus but we are constantly incorporating information and depending on the emotional content and/or context it will be consolidated in some capacity into the implicit memory.

Cognition and Emotion

Sorry this is delayed--having major computer difficulties!

I thought all of the readings for this week focused on a really interesting aspect of child development that is not often explored: the significant developments that allow for emotion. I thought that Lewis in particular had a lot of interesting things to say involving the emergence of consciousness, both of the self  and of society. Lewis argues that this cognition is necessary to understand and produce complex emotions that we have discussed including guilt, love, jealousy, etc. The importance of cognitive evaluation (how he distinguished between emotional states and emotional experience) also seemed particularly relevant in cultural differences in emotion. He again discusses that case of the Japanese and comes to, I think, a very interesting and palpable conclusion: "It may be the case that Japanese children or adults may act in an angry way and may even have the emotional state of anger. However, since having such a state is inappropriate, they are not likely to have the emotional experience of anger" (p. 274). I think this theory probes deeper into the cultural realm than others have, and examines the abstract "display rules" in a developmentally and culturally significant way.

Development and Emotion

The Feeling Brain: Biology and Psychology of Emotion
Week 6: Development and Emotion
Aiden Bussey

To preface my post, I am not particularly interested in developmental psychology. However, some of the topics and theories covered in the reading were interesting to me.

One of the topics I found most interesting was Harris' discussion of narrative as a crucial component of emotional understanding and development. Narrative is an extremely important and intriguing phenomenon that penetrates not only the fields of psychology and neurobiology, but also philosophy, literature, anthropology and other seemingly unrelated disciplines. Further, narrative organization exists across a wide spectrum of ages and cultures, indicating that forming narratives is some sort of fundamental process for humans.

As our other readings have shown, emotion seems to penetrate evolution (non-human animals, including animals without elaborate linguistic systems seem to experience emotion in ways analogous to human experience) and various mental functions (such as reasoning). Thus, it makes sense that emotion would bare some significance in the formation and utilization of narrative.

The link between emotion and narrative to me seems to be related to the link between emotion and reasoning. Emotional contribution to reasoning seems to work primarily through giving value to memory. For instance, emotion allows neutral objects to be perceived as pleasant or unpleasant. This sort of memory requires an awareness of chronology and attribution of significance to the various components of a situation. This is directly related to narrative, which arrange connected events both in terms of chronology and significance.
Similarly, the early psychology of Freud was hugely driven by narrative forms. While much of Freud is no longer used today, he was nonetheless responsible for huge innovations in the field of psychology and many of his theories have an intuitive appeal that, while not necessarily supported by modern understandings of cognition, experience, or emotion, can nevertheless provide insight into the way that cognition, emotion, and experience are experienced. Narrative allows an individual both to situate events in time and space and to construct and arrange meanings. Often, narratives are employed to privilege the present, portraying the past as leading up to the present. This important in that it creates continuity in events that may be experienced as unrelated or senseless.

Week 6 Blog

Sylviane--Week 6

I found Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom’s article on social evaluation by preverbal infants to be very interesting, although it did stimulate quite a bit of doubt within me. I was particularly intrigued by the idea that “the capacity to evaluate individuals by their social actions may also serve as a foundation for a developing system of moral cognition.” At first I was a bit confused as to why the results of this study indicated the beginning of a moral system, for they seemed to reflect more punishment than morals. But I realized that the fact that the child reaches for the “helper’ or “neutral” party rather than the “harmful” party indicates some sort of approval of helping over inhibiting the third party, deeming one set of actions appropriate and the opposing set inappropriate. Another interesting part of this study was the conflicting data of the reaching and staring studies involving a neutral party; while infants reached for a neutral party over the hinder but for the helper over the neural party, this pattern was not reflected.

I did wonder, though, about the validity of the results and conclusions of this study because of both the methods and the population. I was surprised that wooden blocks with large eyes glued on were selected as the “characters” in this experiment. Because the face itself is so unique and a great deal of social information is conveyed through the eyes, it seems as if a more accurate representation would be necessary to truly evaluate an infant’s moral development. It seems unlikely that wooden blocks with eyes glued on would be able to adequately represent this. I am curious to see what would result if the study used blocks without eyes glued on, or blocks with images of actual faces glued on, although I do understand that using real faces would present a problem as well since “infants in the first half-year of life exhibit preferences for social individuals based on static perceptual features (for example, facial attractiveness, race).” The reaching behavior of the infant could possibly be influenced by the perceptual features of the face.

After reading this article, I read the chapters from The Handbook of Emotions and found the section on the development of emotional experiences in the chapter written by Lewis to be interesting. He writes, “Emotional experiences occur through the interpretation and evaluation of states, expressions, situations, behaviors of others, and beliefs about what ought to be happening. Emotional experiences are therefore dependent on cognitive processes.” He writes a bit later, after discussing infants inability to discriminate between facial patterns and have simultaneous comparisons, “This would suggest that infants are not capable of experiencing emotions prior to this point. Perhaps if I had read this article prior to Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom’s article I would have agreed more with this point, but I did not. The article on social evaluation by preverbal infants provided very compelling evidence that evaluate the states, behaviors, and actions of others (they recognized that the third party was being helped or hindered and expressed either approval or disapproval of this) and have beliefs about what ought to be happening (they were surprised when the third party moved towards the hinderer). Although not every single one of the cognitive components Lewis has deemed “necessary” for experiencing an emotion are present, it seems as if it could be possible for infants to experience emotions. While I do agree with the fact that some emotions likely emerge before others, such as fear before shame since shame involves a more complex thought process (social norms, sense of self, disappointment), the emotional experience of infants should not be denied. The example of the woman who did not experience the state of fear she was in as her car slid off the road seems to reflect an attention issues; she was so preoccupied with handling the car she was not aware of the changes in her bodily state. Because infants can focus their attention, though, I do not think it is out of the question for an infant to “be in a state of pain or a state of fear, yet not experience that state.” Being very interested in the biological component of emotions, I wonder if Lewis’s ideas could be tested using some sort of brain imaging task.

Week 6

Sara Dholakia

I have to say, I truly wish I had read the the first two posts lasts, because I enjoyed them the least, and in fact, I would go as far as to say I was trudging through them. I believe that the last three articles on the list said both more eloquently and more succinctly, what the first two were trying to get across.
I didn't find that the first two articles presented much information that I was not already aware of, though I did appreciate that they both presented contrasting viewpoints.
Of the two models offered by Lewis on page 269, I find myself much more inclined toward the first, which asserts that the infant begins with a bio-polar state at birth, meaning the capacity for positive and negative emotions, so to speak, and that subsequent states emerge with the development of the brain and of the infant's interaction with others. This theory claims that specific emotions come about through differentiation of the positive and negative. I know that in class there has been quite a debate over whether emotions begin at the level of positive/negative, etc., and I believe that certain feelings can surely elicit both positive and negative emotions, but I believe that they all come about through differentiation and through development in cognition. For instance, Lewis presents the example of the fear of being caught cheating on a test; one would feel fear in this situation, but only after cognition took place and as a result of one's position in society.
The alternate model, the "discrete-systems model," argues that some states are preprogrammed and do not require further differentiation (269). Some of these states may not present themselves until certain development has occurred, however they are believed to exist.
I was really intrigued by the Harris article, specifically the sections dealing with the impact that emotionally charged conversations and those discussing emotion can have a positive effect on a child's emotional self-awareness. This seems perfectly reasonable, though I had never thought about it. The article shows that children from families that discuss emotion are later better able to define others' feelings, and they have a greater awareness of their own feelings. Moreover, conversation can provide children with a narrative format with which to organize the events of their daily lives (283). Harris does concede that some children may naturally be more empathic or more prone to try to discover others' feelings, however, the evidence provided is quite convincing.
In regards to the Hoffer article, I have to say that more than anything, it reminded me of Harry Harlow's experiments with macaques and the cloth mother. It might be interesting to discuss the extent to which a non-living construction can fill in for a real mother. Of course, a living, breathing caretaker is necessary for optimal development, but given the experiments provided by Hoffer, it would be interesting to get some opinions on the topic.