Effect of emotion on memory

* Text n°1

Why do you remember your wedding night so well when you have no idea to what you did two
nights before? Researchers found that stimulating the vagus nerve improves memory. And
scientists have begun studies in rats to see if stimulating the vagus nerve could speed up
recovery after brain damage. The studies help explain why people remember emotionally
charged events – weddings, deaths, insults – better than ordinary, everyday events.
Scientists already know that part of the explanation lies in the body’s response to emotional
arousal: the body releases adrenaline and other hormones into the blood. But for the most
part, those hormones can’t get to the brain. So how could hormones influence memory?
Studies in rats have suggested that the arousal hormones use the vagus nerve to tell the
brain it should retain to particular memories. Now psychologist Robert Jensen of Southern
Illinois University and colleagues report evidence in humans that the vagus nerve helps make
some memories stick.

* Text n° 2

Bower showed that our emotions may influence what we remember. In a study in 1981, he
asked subjects to keep a diary for a week and to note down all the things that happened to
them which were either pleasant or unpleasant. When the week was over, the subjects were
put into a light hypnotic trance and asked to remember their week. Before that, however,
they were asked if they were either in a good mood or a bad mood. The subjects who were in
a good mood remembered far more of the pleasant things that happened to them the week
before, while the subjects who were in a bad mood remembered far more of the bad things.
It seems that the mood in which they were had given them a ‘set’, which made them more
likely to remember things which fitted with their mood. All this shows that memory, far from
being the static, passive thing that many people think it is, is an active process, which is
affected by the ways that we understand events and by our objective feelings.

* Complete the following text with these words : aroused / charged / treated/ affected /

Findings : It does seem clear that we remember emotionally _______ moments better than
boring ones. Research suggests that it is the emotion ________ , not the personal
significance of the event, that makes such events easier to remember. It does seem that
memories are ______ differently depending on whether they are _________ with pleasant
or unpleasant emotions. This general rule appears to be ______________ by age or other
individual factors. Specifically, pleasant emotions appear to disappear more slowly from our
memory than unpleasant emotions, but among those with mild depression, unplesant or
pleasant emotions tend to disappear evenly.