Emotions and their lasting effects on memory

One of our moto at GetSmily is to promote the idea that emotions affect the memory of people and thus they would later transform those memories into actions in the world being a purchase, a transaction in a store, a discussion with a friend, a sharing of ideas or link on the social networks, etc.

A recent article in “Cognitive & Behavioral Neurology” Journal (September 2014 Issue 3) tends to demonstrate that emotions have a long lasting effect. However this is in a “sad” context since the article discusses the matter by taking Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) patients as test audience, it still reinforces our view on the importance of understanding the mechanisms of emotions and their potential in human behaviour understanding.

Here is an excerpt of the above mentioned article in the conclusions :

These findings indicate that patients with AD can experience prolonged states of emotion that persist well beyond the patients’ memory for the events that originally caused the emotion. The preserved emotional life evident in patients with AD has important implications for their management and care, and highlights the need for caretakers to foster positive emotional experiences.