How do emotions affect our memories?

From the psychology in charge of studying how we think, how we make decisions and how we seek explanations about what we perceive, it is said many times that Human beings try to make ideas fit together until we reach a coherent whole that leaves no room for ambiguity or contradiction.

This is what, for example, studies on the Forer effect or the confirmation bias. However, when it comes to our way of remembering things, this system of organizing coherently, reality goes much further than that: it tries to work not only with ideas, but also with the emotions. This is what the studies of the famous cognitive psychologist suggest Gordon H. Bower.

Memories and emotions

In the 1970s, Bower conducted research on how we store and evoke memories depending on mood. He asked a series of people to memorize lists of words going through different moods. Later, he observed their differences when it came to remembering these words, while also going through different moods.

In this way He found a tendency to remember memorized elements more easily in a state of mind similar to the one we have at the moment of evoking them

. Being sad, we will more easily evoke ideas or experiences that were saved in our memory while we were sad, and the same happens with other states of mind.

In the same way, our state of mind will affect when we select what we keep in the memory: what is the information that will be most important for its subsequent retrieval. Thus, being in a good mood, we will pay more attention to the things that we value as positive, and it will be these memories that are most easily evoked later. Bower called this whole phenomenon "mood-congruent processing", Or" mood-congruent processing. "

The footprint in memory

Ultimately, someone could say that we tend to evoke memories that do not contradict what we are thinking or perceiving at a certain moment... And, However, this would be an incomplete explanation, because it does not go beyond explaining that coherence that has to do with the logical structuring of ideas. rational.

The works of Gordon H. Bower speak of a type of coherence that goes into the realm of emotions. The emotional state definitely leaves its mark on the memory.