emotions and memory article

i was trying to come up with something to blog about, and i went back to the links from a few weeks ago, from when we were working on memory. one of the articles, http://www.psychologyinspain.com/content/full/1998/11frame.htm, was on how memory effects emotion etc.

It's a continuation of the concept that being in a similar place, mood, situation as when a past event occurs increases the chances of remembering it, focusing on how when you are in a certain mood you are more likely to remember things that happened when previously in the same mood. This is connected to depression, specifically that what draws people deeper into depression is when in a depressed/negative emotional mood they remember past events that are connected to negative emotions, increasing the overall negative feeling. It would make sense that as someone builds up more negative memories, this could lead to an increasing depression. One explanation is that the emotions trigger other emotions, which in turn trigger memories related to these emotions. The second explanation is that the emotions themselves aren't triggered, but that different effects of the mood you are in (reasons to cause happiness, sadness, etc, follow certain patterns that connect to other similar experiences, like places and people, memory coding details).
The main difference between these two concepts is that in the first the mood or emotion triggers the memories, in the second the details involved in the situation that creates the mood are similar to those involved in past events that also shared that mood, and so those details trigger memories, or that just thinking of the mood/emotion itself, without feeling it, can trigger these memories. It's not the physical emotion itself triggering more memories, but the idea of a separate description of the emotion (like labeling a set of memories as "sad").

This was kind of confusing to me at first, but I'm starting to understand it. In the article, it describes memory triggers almost like descriptive labels, kind of like what we have on the blog. And also it talks about how a mood state can be induced, and how when this happens, they have proven that when you are in a certain mood you are more likely to remember things that agreed with that mood as well as when you are thinking of that kind of mood, as showed in some of their testing (of students watching film clips, they remembered more words associated with the same mood as in the film clip after watching the clip), which shows that moods can be triggers in concept without the person actually being in that mood state.
One thing that could go against this, which we covered later on in class, and which i also blogged about, are mirror neurons and the idea that in order to understand what we see our brain triggers things so as to create a mirroring of feeling, so that we automatically are able to feel and understand what we are seeing. If this is occurring when watching a movie, say a sad movie, without consciously being in that mood we could be feeling some effect of that mood, and in that way, if we were to remember more sad words after seeing that sad film clip, there would be no way of telling if we were temporarily mirroring a sad mood, and causing an emotional trigger rather than a coding trigger. And thus, the emotion/mood could connect directly with the memory. The main results that the study shows is that emotions/mood can be descriptive triggers in memory, removed from the feeling itself. But, if what I suggest does connect, that could kind of go against their theory. Since this study is based on work that's been going on for decades and the whole mirror neuron thing is fairly new and not proven, it would be silly to say "I proved you wrong", its more of another perspective, another direction to look in, and when researching and understanding these things the best thing they can do is find all the disagreeing information and disprove it, coming closer to certainty.

I just made this connection as I'm writing this blog, and I find it interesting how all of these things seem to connect to each other. I mean, I know it should connect, but it's always exciting when you're thinking about one thing and it connects to another that you've learned and you can put it all to use.