How do emotions affect our memories? Gordon Bower’s theory

Gordon Bower studies the nature of our memory and how emotions modulate memories.

In psychology, which studies how we think, how we make decisions and how we seek explanations for what we perceive, it is often said that human beings try to make ideas fit together into a coherent whole that leaves no room for ambiguity or contradiction.

This is suggested, for example, by studies on the Forer Effect or the confirmation bias. However, as far as our way of remembering things is concerned, this system of coherently organizing reality goes much further than that: it tries to work not only with ideas, but also with emotions. This is what is suggested by the studies of the famous cognitive psychologist Gordon H. Bower.

Memories and emotions

In the 1970s, Bower conducted research on our way of storing and recalling memories depending on our moods. He asked a number of people to memorize lists of words by going through different moods. He then observed their differences in remembering these words as they went through different moods.

In this way, he found a tendency to he found a tendency to recall more easily the memorized items in a mood similar to the mood we are in at the time of recalling them.. When we are sad, we will more easily recall ideas or experiences that were stored in our memory when we were sad, and the same happens with other moods.

In the same way, our mood will affect the moment of selecting what we keep in our memory: which information will be more important for later retrieval. Thus, when we are in a good mood we will pay more attention to the things we value as positive, and it is these memories that are more easily evoked later. Bower called this whole phenomenon "mood-congruent processing"or "mood-congruent processing".

The memory trace

In short, one could say that we tend to evoke memories that do not contradict what we are thinking or perceiving at a given moment... And yet, this would be an incomplete explanation, because it does not go beyond explaining that coherence that has to do with the logical structuring of ideas, the rational.

Gordon H. Bower's work tells us about a type of coherence that enters the realm of emotions. The emotional state definitely leaves its mark on memory..