Monday, April 11, 2011
Stress and Your Social Memory
In the high stakes, fasted passed world we have grown to live in, it is now more important than ever to make a good first impression and leap through the social loops that are necessary in getting ahead in life. Being forced in these situations can lead to many problems, and discussed in the article Stress and Your Social Memory, Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. discusses how stress affects our memory capacity, especially when it comes to remembering peoples names. Krauss begins to explain a situation in which we are forced to meet a group of important people, and as we are being introduced to them, we have already forgotten and are failing to process any of the names we are trying to learn. When we are stressed a hormone in the brain called Cortisol, a native reaction to a fright-or-flight, impairs our ability to short term memory and judgment when we are have higher levels of anxiety. Research conducted on stress and its effect on our mental states proved that when we are asked to memorize information and placed in a difficult situation, participants who had higher stress, (as well as higher cortisol levels) were unable to recall information as well as the participants who were less stressed. Applying this idea that stress affects our memory can explain, support, and go against many typically concrete ideas that we have. In our discussion last week about the validity of our memories really rose the idea, that what we remember isn't always true. In the case of the rape victim, who was defiantly in a high stress situation, her first-witness testimony turned out to be misunderstood, when she identified the wrong suspect as the attacker. It seems stress plays a more important role in our lives than I had ever thought before. Currently its making me seem crazy about how I will get my homework accomplished, and now it has the power to affect my social behaviors, and chances to succeed in my career. It also has the power to completely alter memories in high anxiety situations. Who knows how many times stress has affected our lives, making it that much more desirable to remain as stress free as possible.
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