When emotion intensifies memory interference

Many of our most vivid memories are of emotional events; in research studies, emotional events or items are often more likely to be remembered than neutral events or items. However, as pointed out in this chapter, the same characteristics that make emotional information memorable can also make emotional information more subject to interference effects in memory. Thus, being reminded of some emotional memories can interfere with other memories evoking the same emotion, it can be more difficult to update oneʼs memory of the context of an emotional item, it can be harder to learn a new association to something that was previously associated with an emotional item, and frequent re-exposure to a cue to a negative memory can increase forgetting of that negative memory. Table of