It seems as if Human Emotion is the one and only process that drives us. We behave and function with each other because of the emotions we experience. We develop into who we are because of the emotions we feel in our lifetimes. However, it is a concept that still seems to be unclear to us. Is it something physical? An abstract object that controls our actions? Do we even truly require emotions?
Emotion in itself, is far too complicated for us to understand it wholly. However, we may be able to look at it from specific viewpoints, from how Emotion impacts our daily functioning. Therefore, in the next few words, I will be diving into how Human Emotion can impact Cognition. Specially the biopsychological aspect of fear and how it affects the cognitive process of memory.
A growing body of evidence suggests emotion boosts memory accuracy to an extent but affects the subjective sense of recollection even more. There have been various studies conducted that examine memories of arousing real-life events and show that emotion in fact heightens the feeling of remembering, even if the memories are not entirely accurate. This phenomenon is known as a ‘Flashbulb memory’. Flashbulb memories are exceptionally vivid long-lasting memories for any circumstance surrounding a dramatic event which one could have either experienced or learnt about.
Brown and Kulik (1977) constructed the special-mechanism hypothesis, which supposedly demonstrated the existence of a distinct special neural mechanism for flashbulb memories. A common approach seems to characterize studies of flashbulb memory. Researchers generally conduct their studies of flashbulb memory following a surprising and consequential public event. Sharot et al. conducted a study in 2007 following the 9/11 terrorist attack that had taken place previously. The aim of this study was to determine the role of biological factors on flashbulb memories.
This was a case study where a sample of 24 people who were present during the 9/11 attack in New York. The study was conducted three years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in Manhattan. Participants were put in an fMRI machine and whilst in the scanner they were presented with word cues on the screen alongside the word summer or September in order to get the participant to link the words to either the summer holidays or the 9/11 attack. Participants brains were scanned and recorded while they were recalling events. The memories of personal events from the summer were used as a baseline of brain activity for evaluating the nature of the 9/11 attacks.
Afterwards, participants were asked to rate their memories for vividness, detail, confidence in accuracy and arousal. They were also asked to write down their personal memories. Sharot and her team found that the activation of the amygdala for the participants who were downtown was higher when they recalled memories of the terrorist attack than when they recalled events from the preceding summer, whereas those participants who were further away from the event had equal levels of response in the amygdala when recalling both events. The strength of amygdala activation at retrieval was shown to correlate with flashbulb memories.
Flashbulb memories are so vivid because they are often associated with highly emotional events, which can heighten attention and deepen memory encoding. They involve strong emotional reactions, typically from surprise or shock, which stimulate the amygdala, a brain structure involved in emotion and memory, enhancing the recall of the event’s details. In this case, the fear that the people present during the 9/11 attack was so strong that it caused them to have a strong biological reaction caught by the fMRI scanners. This simply shows the extent to which emotion can impact us and the influence it has on our lives through a biopsychological context.
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