The Effects of Emotions on Memory and Forgetfulness

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The two main emotional factors that influence memory and forgetting are flashbulb and repression. A flashbulb memory is a memory that has a high emotional significance they are accurate and long lasting. It is almost a photographic memory of a particularly emotional event that is imprinted on your mind. For example an event such as September the 11th, people can remember things such as how they heard it happened, what clothes they were wearing and who they were with very clearly. This is because it was such a sudden emotional impact when they heard it that it got imprinted in their memory. Repression is an emotional factor in forgetting. It is that we forget because we have great anxiety about certain memories. This is because certain memories people push to the back of their mind and try to not think about causing the memories to exist but in the unconscious mind where a cue is needed for recall.

There is lots of evidence for the flashbulb memory. Some studies in particular that show the existence of flashbulb memories were done by Sheingold and Tenney (1982). Sheingold and Te...

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