Memory and emotions.

What is the relationship between memory and emotions? 

The memory process is directly associated with emotional responses. We know that we primarily remember what we have paid attention to.

In order for certain information to be fixed and can be remembered later, it must initially go through the attention process. Sometimes we try to remember what we read or heard while we were distracted, and we see that it is very difficult if not impossible to do so. The ability to concentrate is essential to enable the storage process of that information.

In this line, we can think that anxiety, for example, can interfere with the memory process, because in essence, it intervenes in the attention process. If we are thinking about many things at the same time, or our mind is always ahead, constantly bringing up potential future problems, it is difficult for us to attend to the information that we are receiving at the moment. And therefore, we can hardly remember it later.

Parallel to this, much of what we remember usually has an associated emotion. What caused us shock, anguish, fear, or great enjoyment is usually recorded more vividly, in relation to the information to which no particular emotionality is associated.

This, like almost everything in human psychology, has its exceptions. Or rather, in many cases it is not fulfilled, due to the so-called repression mechanism. As Freud described a long time ago, many of the most traumatic events, those that have had an intense emotional charge, tend to fall under repression. Thanks to this mechanism, and probably in order to protect the psyche, we do not remember them. However, the repressed contents in a large number of cases continue to produce effects in the life of the person in question.

From Psychoanalysis it is believed that working from the symptom, it is possible to reach these repressed contents, thus allowing them to remember, make them aware, and deactivate the symptomatic mechanism they generate.

This depends a lot on a case-by-case basis and on the type of symptom, but it gives us an overview of Repression and how it affects our memories. For Freud, there is also the so-called Screening Memories, which are certain images or fantasies that would come to fill, as he described it, the gaps in memory.

Now leaving Psychoanalysis, we return to emotions in relation to memory. We frequently notice how memory is closely associated with the senses. Certain aromas, landscapes, tactile sensations, sounds, flavors, transport us to other moments and bring us a particular memory. The senses help us remember. Through them, scenes are transported that have probably had relevance for us. Sometimes we remember what made us happy or made us feel safe. A gesture of love or affection, or a memory of the pleasure of play and exploration, for example.

Many times the memories are associated with unpleasant sensations or intense emotions, such as great anguish or fear. When emotions intervene, they produce a state of attention, sometimes alert, which accentuates the possibility of fixing that content.

Although, as always, this is not always the case, we can evaluate and know the multiple relationships that exist between emotions and memory. Not only in terms of information storage but also in the recovery process. Since the memory has the ability to reproduce in the present the emotion that developed at that moment in the past.

 

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