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EVENTS AND EMOTION ARE STORED IN MEMORY TOGETHER
The 1950s saw a revival of interest in the study of memory. Increasingly sophisticated models of short- and long-term memory were developed, in order to explain how information is selected, organized, stored, and retrieved. The ways in which memories could be forgotten or distorted were also identified.
Memory and mood
By the 1970s, the focus in learning theory and memory had moved to investigating why some memories are better stored or more easily retrieved than others. One of the foremost psychologists in the field, Gordon H. Bower, had noticed that emotion appeared to impact on memory. Bower carried out studies in which people learned lists of words while in different moods, and later had to recall them, again when in varying emotional states.
He uncovered what he called “mood-dependent retrieval”: whatever a person has learned when unhappy is easier to recall when they are again unhappy. Bower concluded that we form an association between our emotional state and what is going on around us, and the emotion and the information are stored in memory together. It is then easier to recall facts that we learned when we were in the same mood as we are when recollecting(回忆) them.
"People who are happy during the initial experience learn the happy events better; angry people learn anger-provoking events better."
Gordon H. Bower
Bower also discovered that emotion plays a part in the type of information that the brain stores. When we are happy, he observed that we tend to notice – and therefore remember – positive things; when we are sad, negative things attract our attention and are committed to memory more easily. For example, Bower found that unhappy people recalled details of a sad story better than those who were happy when they read it.
He called this “mood-congruent processing”, and concluded that episodic memory – of events, not just words or facts – is especially linked to emotions. The events and emotions are stored together, and we remember best the events that match our mood, both when they occurred, and when recalling them. Bower’s findings led him to study people in various emotional states, retrospectively observing their videotaped interactions with others.
Memory and judgement of past behaviour varied with current mood. This research helped Bower to refine his ideas about emotion and memory, and inspired further psychological examination of the role emotions play in our lives. An idyllic holiday, according to Bower, is more easily recalled when we are in a happy mood. Bad memories of the holiday are likely to be forgotten, or only remembered when we are unhappy.
MORE TO KNOW…
APPROACH
Memory studies
BEFORE
1927 Bluma Zeigarnik describes the “Zeigarnik effect” of interrupted tasks being better remembered than uninterrupted ones.
1956 George Armitage Miller’s The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two provides a cognitive model for storage in short-term memory.
1972 Endel Tulving makes a distinction between semantic(语义的) and episodic memory.
AFTER
1977 Roger Brown coins the term “flashbulb(闪光灯) memory” for autobiographical memory connected with highly emotional events.
2001 Daniel Schacter publishes The Seven Sins of Memory, which categorizes the ways that memory can fail.
GORDON H. BOWER
Gordon H. Bower was brought up in Scio, Ohio, USA. At high school, he was more interested in baseball and playing jazz than studying, until a teacher introduced him to the works of Sigmund Freud. He went on to graduate in psychology at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, switching to Yale for his PhD in learning theory, which he completed in 1959.
From Yale, Bower moved on to the internationally acclaimed psychology department of Stanford University, California, where he taught until his retirement in 2005. His research there helped to develop the field of cognitive science, and in 2005 Bower was awarded the US National Medal of Science for his contributions to cognitive and mathematical psychology.
Key works
1966, 1975 Theories of Learning (with Ernest Hilgard)
1981 Mood and Memory
1991 Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Volume 27)
以下是我写的关于The Psychology Book的其他章节，欢迎各位前来观看 ^ ^
