Bad memories more vivid than good ones, just ask Red Sox, Yankees fans

William Atkins
Wednesday, 29 August 2007 21:29

Science - Health

Whether a memory is retained or not seems to depend on if the event if good or bad, according to a U.S. psychologist at Boston College. She specifically asked New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox fans about their baseball memories.                  

As reported in the Association for Psychological Science (APS) journal Current Directions in Psychological Science within the article “Negative Emotion Enhances Memory Accuracy” (volume 16, issue 4, pages 213-218, August 2007), American psychologist Elizabeth Kensinger, Boston College, Massachusetts, describe how ones emotions determine if a memory is remembered or not. She says that the bad memories are more likely remembered with greater detail than the good ones.

The abstract of the paper states: “There have been extensive discussions about whether emotional memories contain more accurate detail than nonemotional memories do, or whether individuals simply believe that they have remembered emotional experiences more accurately. I review evidence that negative emotion enhances not only the subjective vividness of a memory but also the likelihood of remembering some (but not all) event details. I then describe neuroimaging evidence suggesting that engagement of emotion-processing regions (particularly the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex) relates to the encoding and retrieval of details intrinsically linked to negative items.”

The regions of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), located within the frontal lobes just above the eyes, and the amygdale, located within the medial temporal lobes, are involved with cognitive (thinking) processes such as decision making. They also process and determine how accurately memories, and the emotions associated with them, are retained.

Kensinger contends that remembering bad events more distinctively than good ones has allowed humans to plan for similar events in the future. Once a bad event is remembered, it is easier to deal with it the next time it occurs. This ability has evolved over the millions of years of human evolution, and has played an important role in the survival of the human species.

Keninger also participated in a study involving fans reactions when the Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees to win the American League baseball playoff series in October 2004. Diehard fans from both teams, plus fans that didn’t care which team won, participated in the study to decide whether good or bad memories are more vivid and which ones produce the most emotion. The article is found on the Harvard University Gazette website of “Bad times make for more accurate memories: Red Sox fans saw things differently from Yankee fans”.