How Do Your Moods and Emotions Affect Your Memory?

So, episodic memories are memories that we have for specific moments; for events; for little episodes in our life.

For instance, if you can recall your sixteenth birthday party, that is an episodic memory. It's got a time; it's got a place; it's something you did; it's something you experienced.

Semantic memories, on the other hand, are memories for facts; for ideas; for information that can stand-alone and exist in isolation.

For instance, when I ask, ‘In what year was the Declaration of Independence signed?’, the answer (1776) is a specific fact that you can access.

Now, why does this matter?

Well, there are decades of research showing that moods and emotions have a huge impact on episodic memories.

How you feel; the mood you're in when you make an episodic memory will in-part determine how you can access that memory later.

So, for instance, if you were really happy at your birthday party, it will be easier for you to remember this event when you're happy in the future …

But, if you were sad at your party, then it will be easier to for you to remember this event when you're sad in the future.

Our emotions; our mood becomes imprinted on that memory, and dictates how we can then access these episodic memories going forward.

So, we have this long history of research pertaining to the relationship between moods and episodic memories … but, believe it or not, few people have ever looked deeply at the impact of mood on retrieving semantic memories.

And it’s logical to wonder if the same relationship holds true?

Enter this research paper.

So, what these researchers did is they sat people down and induced either a positive or a negative mood.

They spent about five or ten minutes having their subjects look at positive pictures and writing positive affirmations, or looking at negative pictures talking about negative things.

Then, once subjects were in a desired mood, they asked them 50 general knowledge questions; specific questions that tested semantic facts such as, ‘Who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird?’

And, what did these researchers discover?

Well, it turns out that mood and emotion has absolutely no impact on semantic memory retrieval, confidence or judgment of knowledge.

It didn't matter if subjects were happy or sad … semantic memories were just semantic memories; they either knew the general facts or they didn’t.

So, what does this mean?

It means that semantic memories are not tied to any mood, emotion or context. It means that semantic memories are our usable knowledge.

Because they are acontextual, you can access them whenever and however you want.

And this means that building semantic memories is key when we want people to start using base information to build bigger ideas and concepts

Now why should this matter to teachers and students? How does this swing back to education?

Well, to understand, you have to first address the question, ‘Where do semantic memories come from?’ … and, it turns out that semantic memories all begin as episodic memories.

For instance, you didn't just wake-up one day and know that To Kill a Mockingbird was written by Harper Lee … you first had to learn this fact through a series of episodic memories.

One day somebody mentioned this fact in casual conversation; and then maybe a week later you saw the cover of To Kill a Mockingbird in a bookshop and said to yourself ‘Oh, Harper Lee is the author’; and then a month later you saw the movie on TV …

The point is, you built the semantic memory through a series of episodic memories.

And these episodic memories -- which are heavily influenced by mood and emotion -- are the building blocks of semantic memories, which seem to be devoid of emotion, and mostly acontextual.

So, what does this mean for us? How should this information guide our behavior moving forward?

Well, idea number one is this:

If semantic memories are built from episodic memories, then exposure and repetition are key in early learning.

It's not enough just to give somebody a single exposure to a fact …

As teachers, we need to (with intention) build multiple episodic memories into our curriculum surrounding the same ideas/information if we really want our students to pull out the semantic facts and build a strong foundation of usable knowledge.

Which brings us to idea number two …

So, a lot of people take this idea of exposure and repetition to simply mean rote memorization, which leads them to do the same thing; to go through the same motions every day.

But no, here's where we start to see that if emotions matter in the context of episodic memories, and episodic memories are the building blocks of semantic memories, we need to approach important ideas and concepts through a variety of emotional angles.

As teachers, we need to remain aware of the moods/emotions we are imparting to our students as we lead them through these experiences; these learning episodes, and we should strive to build emotional diversity into our practice to help our students establish a solid base of acontextual knowledge.

And finally, idea number three …

So interestingly, this research kind of sheds new light onto the usage of low-stakes and/or no-stakes quizzes.

So, in general, most basic knowledge quizzes like these are meant to test semantics facts. We want to make sure our students have a strong grasp of key information before we push forward.

And, based on this research, we know that student performance on these types of quizzes should not be impacted by their moods and/or emotions.

Now, as an aside, stress can potentially impact test performance -- but believe it or not, stress is not an emotion, and that's something we can address in a future video …

But generally speaking, regardless of whether a student is having a good day a bad day, their ability to retrieve semantic facts should not be impaired.

And this means that if your students are performing well on these types of low-stakes quizzes, it's a good indication that they have a strong grasp of the basic ideas/concepts, and that it's time to move onto deeper learning and/or start pushing them further.

On the other hand, if your students are not performing well on these types of quizzes, you can be pretty confident that the issue is not one of emotional distraction or interference, but rather a lack of fundamental understanding.

Thank you all so much for watching. I hope you're well, and I hope you took a value from this video.

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We’ll talk again soon. Thanks!