Remembering Emotional Events: a Social Cogn Itive N Eu Roscience Approach

Horv we respond emotional ly to the peaks and val leys of l i l i r reveals nruch about who we are now, who we have irccn, and has implications for who we could be in the f rrturc. The qucstion of how we remember these emotional ,,r 'ents is lhus of central inrportance to understanding hunran experir:nce, and is the subfect of this chapter. In ad, lressing this qucstion, our goals are to understand the sper i f ic neurocognit ive mechanisms that preserve records of signif icant experiences, the motivational and contcxtual iar:tors that inf luence their operation, and what their intcraction tel ls us about the relat ionship betwet'n memory ,rnd emotion rnore general ly. We begin with a brief historir ;al sketch of previous approaches to emotion and mernory and then move to our orvn mult i leveled social cognit ive neuroscience approach. \Ve then apply this approach to understanding how the enotional nature of an event inf luences the encoding, storage, and retr ieval of information about i t . We conclude rvith suggestions for ways in which a social cognit ive neuroscience approach can guide future research.