Do you ever wonder why sometimes you can remember the most random things, but forget to turn the stove off before leaving the house? A recent study by U of T researchers Dr. Rebecca Todd and Dr. Adam Anderson, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, offers an explanation.
The researchers discovered that when humans experience heightened emotions, whether negative or positive, they are more likely to remember a given event. By showing their subjects images of varying emotion — from stimulating scenes like shark attacks to boring snapshots of people on an escalator — the researchers found that people would have a stronger recollection of the emotional images. Todd believes that this is caused by our amygdala, the emotion-forming part of the brain, which is more active when we see images that are more emotionally vivid. The Varsity interviewed Dr. Todd to gain more insight into her take on this fascinating science.
THE VARSITY
Before working at U of T, what did you do?
REBECCA TODD
My first career was as a contemporary dance choreographer and as a journalist. Then, I went back to school and got my Ph.D. in Applied Psychology and Human Development at OISE and I now work as a post-doctoral researcher.
THE VARSITY
So what piqued your interest in studying emotions and cognition?
REBECCA TODD
Well, I think I originally became really interested in it when I was working as a choreographer and I was directing dancers and how they interact with cognition.
I would often want them to express certain feelings, and dancers aren’t very good at that. You can’t tell them to just express an emotion and they’ll do it — so I would start to play with mental imagery. That would influence the quality of their emotions, and as a result I became very aware of their attention and what they were thinking about.
That’s how I became really interested in influence and memory and stuff like that — it was all sort of tied up. I wanted the tools of scientific research that were objective. In dance, it was just the subjective experience of myself and my dancers and whoever else might be watching us.
THE VARSITY
So where did your interest in this specific study come from?
REBECCA TODD
The original idea, well, people talk about flashbulb memories. There is a lot of research that we remember the important events more vividly than we remember just boring events. There have been studies of 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination, and it turns out that we don’t remember them more accurately but just more vividly.
THE VARSITY
What do you mean by accurately versus vividly?
REBECCA TODD
Well, people vividly call it up, we feel like we can re-live it — but we often remember them wrong. There have been a lot of studies done that show that emotional memories are just inaccurate.
THE VARSITY
So your curiosity grew?
REBECCA TODD
Yes. Emotional arousal influences [the] processes by which memories are laid down over time, so all this could be the reason for the vividness of emotional memory. So we wondered whether it was because you see it more vividly when it happens. But we didn’t know that. Nobody had shown that before, so that was really the question behind the study.
The Varsity
So what constitutes an emotionally arousing event? Does it have specific criteria?
REBECCA TODD
Well, in the lab we get people to rate pictures on how arousing they are and we give them a definition of arousing.
THE VARSITY
Is it subjective?
REBECCA TODD
Yes! It’s very subjective. Now, you can measure it objectively, like heart rate or skin conductance, you know the sweat on the palm of your hands. Those will usually correlate quite well to people’s subjective experiences of what’s arousing.
THE VARSITY
And do you find that it’s an emotionally arousing event, the criteria, it’s kind of constant between people from different cultures, different ages, and different genders?
REBECCA TODD
That was my favourite question. No, it’s not! We have other studies that show that emotionally arousing events actually change over development. We know that older adults, senior citizens, find positive things to be more emotionally salient and arousing relative to negative things. Whereas young adults, especially undergraduates — you know the ones we study all the time — find negative events more salient and arousing. Little kids are like older people and find positive things, like smiling faces, more salient and emotionally arousing. So it certainly changes over development and it differs between individuals. I mean, what’s something that is very emotionally salient to me is not going to be to you. Like you might have a spider phobia and I might not be bothered by them at all. So it is very subjective and between cultures as well.
THE VARSITY
I find that a lot of students that go to U of T, go through training their semantic memory (like learning things) a lot, but a large majority don’t know to deal with their episodic memory — in the sense that they don’t know how to deal with their emotions or they try suppress them. So in acting, especially in classes where they use Strasberg’s method acting, they always ask you “What are you feeling right now” and “What are your emotions when you are doing this?” And you start to identify them, and when you are able to clearly identify them you are able to understand them better. And I find a lot of students who are stressed, try to push it away and tell themselves things like “I’m not stressed”— so they don’t manage it and it eventually explodes.
REBECCA TODD
I think that is true. I think U of T is a very hyper-competitive, academic culture and it’s kind of like there is the kind of “right stuff” attitude. So if you admit to being anxious or stressed, you are weak and you don’t cut it. But from the students I see, from asking them casually, almost a third of them have been diagnosed with anxiety and depression. And it’s probably not accidental! It probably has a lot to do with —
THE VARSITY
The repression!
REBECCA TODD
And they are in a culture that puts a lot of stress on them without providing them with any useful tools. And I think that any artistic practice or form of meditation are all really good ways of getting in touch with our emotions and with dealing with stress a lot better.
