Emotional Memory Essay

Emotional entrepot pertains to an individualisticists recollection of sequents that involve occurred in the past. The mechanism can such strong retention is mainly based on the emotions that are associated with that picky compositors case, progenying in a increased aim of attention that facilitates encoding of the event in the recollection of an individual. Emotional entrepot is similarly refer in ruminations of the occurrence, regardless of the length of sentence that has already passed away since the tangible event.This kind of holding can be distinguished from new(prenominal) neurobiological concepts of memory because its retention is very strong due to the influence of emotions, which technically magnifies details of the incident. Research has shown that stimulated memory is imprinted in the cortical percentage of the wizardry. This description is supported by notices that several neural activities occur in the cortex, so facilitating memory retention. S everal studies redeem indicated that emotional memory involves cardinal major processes, namely encoding and post-encoding.The first process of encoding involves the heightened level of attention of an individual during the certain event, while post-encoding pertains to the consolidation of the details of the event after the actual incident, coupled with enhancement that is triggered by the emotions that were set collide with at that metre. One prime example of an emotional memory is the in writing(p) callback of an accident that is associated with physical injury and blood. Regardless of the length of time that the incident has occurred, the individual who was involved in the accident is tranquillize sure-footed of remembering the accident even after several years.One leg of emotional memory is that an individual finds it difficult to dissociate his emotions with regards to a particular incident. It is thus extremumly hard for an individual to go back to the site of an accident if this person al closely died at that time. It has been suggested that evolution also solves a role in emotional memory, wherein the brain of human beings has acquired the capacity to stay fresh details of an event in order to survive that particular incident.It whitethorn thus be workable that through fear, early primates and other higher mammals whitethorn have learned to stay away from predators and other harmful environmental comp onenessnts in order to survive in the wild. These species whitethorn have adapted such modes of memory by being field of battleed to extreme discomfort or pain that is related to incidents such as toxin motion picture or predation and thus their perception for harmful conditions may have been imprinted in their brains and possibly passed on to their offspring.The exact mechanism behind the convalescence of memories associated with a particular incident based on emotional settings still remains elusive up to this date. The unique featur e of storage for a prolonged period of time further complicates the pathway and several analysts have attempted to address this question. Neurobiologists have suggested that emotional memory may be act as a complete process unless an individual is fitting to retrieve the information associated with a specific incident in the past. transshipment center of information, or encoding, is simply one component of the entire emotional memory pathway yet the retrieval of specific information is essential in determining that the entire process has been completed. It has also been suggested that emotional memory is easier to admission over the neutral events, and this is also partly due to the role of amygdala, which influences how the genus Hippocampus functions at such events. In addition to the emotional influence, sleep also sways the brain to remember specific incidents, wherein the descend of sleep can result in a positive or ban condition for memory. harmonise to Sterpenic et al. (2 007), memory is influenced by sleep through the imposition of neural correlates. through the application of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a equation of neural ties was examined among subjects who were able to sleep for a sufficient amount of time and those who were deprived of sleep. The investigation was designed towards a stage wherein the subjects were allowed to undergo post-encoding, which is one of the two stages of emotional memory. The investigation showed that subjects who received seemly hours of sleep had the top executive to remember the positive events that occurred.On the other hand, an interesting observation came from those subjects who were subjected to a particular negative event. They observed that regardless of sufficiency or privation of sleep, the subject participant was able to hold the details of the negative event, most probably through the characteristic emotion that was generated from the negative stimuli. Another observation gathere d by neurobiologists regarding emotional memory was that several regions of the brain were liable in retaining such details and emotions. The two major brains areas involved in emotional memory were the hippocampus and the cortex.Specific regions of the cortex that were responsible for emotional memory included the prefrontal cortex, which is also involved in criminality. It seems that negative emotions, such as that involved in emotional memory, are generally stored in this region of the brain. Moreover, fMRI scanning showed a functional connection between these two regions of the brain and the combinatorial effect of these regions was magnified when the incident is featured with negative stimuli or emotions. It is interesting to know that sleep may also have a selective effect on the memory of an individual.The amygdala was observed to only stimulate the hippocampus for encoding when a negative event has occurred and this happens with or without sleep. On the other hand, a bles sed incident will only be stored in the hippocampus if an individual receives enough sleep. Such selective storage of details may be largely influenced by emotions during that particular event, and not simply by the amount of time that an individual was able to sleep. Such kinds of research investigations are thus important in the providing a better understanding of how emotions influence an individuals memory and ultimately, ones mental condition.It has also been shown that emotions play a major role in the storage of details in the brain. In an investigation that involved manipulation of the context of emotion of subject participants, the activity of the neural networks in the brain was examined. A specific memory tested also allowed the comparison of retrieval capacities of the brain and the research conducted by Smith et al. (2005) showed that the presence of emotions increased the likelihood that an individual will retain the details of the incident.The emotional memory tested in this plain showed that the actual area of brain involved in this mechanism is the left typeface of the amygdala, as well as the left side of the frontotemporal region of the cortex. The study also showed that the right side of the amydala and the frontotemporal cortex was not capable enough of storing details of a specific incident, regardless of its coupling to emotions. It is thus possible that when an individual has damaged the left side of his brain, then it is impossible for him to recall any other details of his past.It should also be understood that lore is mainly based on memory as well as emotion, yet for several yesterday there were not attempts performed into looking into the fine details of the pathway. In addition, there were also only a hardly a(prenominal) reported regarding the interaction of the amygdala and the cortex and on how these two regions responded to each(prenominal) others messages. The advent of high definition imaging technologies such as the m agnetic resonance imaging allowed the visualization of internal regions of the brain that were perceived to be unreachable by an other analytical means.ReferencesSmith, A. P. , Henson, R. N. , Rugg, M. D. and Dolan, R. J. (2005). prosody of retrieval processing reflects accuracy of emotional source memory. Learning and Memory, 12, 472479. Sterpenich, V. , Albouy, G. , Boly, M. , Vandewalle, G. , Darsaud, A. , Balteau, E. , Dang-Vu, T. T. , Desseilles. M. , DArgembeau, A. , Gais, S. , Rauchs, G. , Schabus, M. , Degueldre, C. , Luxen, A. , Collette, F. , Maquet, P. (2007). Sleep-related hippocampo-cortical interplay during emotional memory recollection. PloS Bi