Study shows negative memories remembered better than positive

After seeing a man on a street holding a gun, people remember the gun vividly, but they forget the details of the street. \nA new psychological study shows why this happens. According to the study, published in the August issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, people remember the bad times better than the good.\nIn the study, Boston College psychologist Elizabeth Kensinger and her colleagues explain when emotion is likely to reduce our memory inconsistencies.\n“We know that any event that has emotional quality to it is going to involve a variety of brain circuits that could be positive or negative,” said David B. Pisoni, chancellor’s professor of psychology and director of the speech research lab at IU. “These are now well known to be involved in encoding memory.”\nA strong memory of particular events is called flashbolt memory, Pisoni said. \n“We generally remember things that we attend to,” said Richard M. Shiffrin, Luther Dana Waterman Professor of Psychology at IU. “The study stands for itself, but as long as events are equally noticeable and attended to, then there is no reason to expect one kind of events to have an advantage over the other.”\nFunctional Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies have shown increased cellular activity in emotion-processing regions of the brain at the time that a person experiences a negative event, according to the release.\nKensinger argues in the study that recognizing the effects of negative emotion on memory may save our lives by guiding our actions and allowing us to plan for similar future occurrences.\nAccording to the release, this line of research has far-reaching implications in understanding autobiographical memory and assessing the validity of eyewitness testimony. \n“We know of people who have a strong memory of particular events,” Pisoni said. “These are events with strong emotional and personal relevance and they are retrieved much better by our memory.”