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Email You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. University University of Queensland

Negative emotions, such as fear, can enhance your memories for places, a new study confirms.

Oliver Baumann from the Queensland Brain Institute found that associating negative imagery with specific locations activates a part of the brain responsible for forming memory of places during navigation—the parahippocampal cortex.

“This heightened recall occurs automatically, without people even being aware that the negative imagery is affecting their memories,” says Baumann.

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“Our findings show that emotions can exert a powerful influence on spatial and navigational memory for places, says Baumann. “It could serve as a cue for avoiding potential threats.” The study appears in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

“In future we might be able to boost memory functions by triggering the positive side-effects of emotional arousal, while avoiding the need for negative experiences.”

For the research, Professor Jason Mattingley built a “virtual house” and staged events in each room unrelated to the subject navigating the house. The events were designed to elicit an emotional response—positive, negative, or neutral, and varied in their rate of occurrence.

“The events were illustrated using images from the International Affective Picture System library and included dramatic scenes of attack and threat, as well as more pleasant imagery,” Baumann says.

The day after navigating through the house, participants viewed static images of the house without the emotional imagery, while their neural activity was recorded using an MRI scanner.

“The results showed that emotional arousal exerted a powerful influence on memory by enhancing parahippocampal activity,” Baumann explains.

Source: University of Queensland