The capacity to control emotion is important for human adaptation. Questions about the neural bases of emotion regulation have recently taken on new importance, as functional imaging studies in humans have permitted direct investigation of control strategies that draw upon higher cognitive processes difficult to study in nonhumans. Such studies have examined (1) controlling attention to, and (2) cognitively changing the meaning of, emotionally evocative stimuli. These two forms of emotion regulation depend upon interactions between prefrontal and cingulate control systems (...) and cortical and subcortical emotion-generative systems. Taken together, the results suggest a functional architecture for the cognitive control of emotion that dovetails with findings from other human and nonhuman research on emotion. (shrink)

Though emotion conveys memory benefits, it does not enhance memory equally for all aspects of an experience, nor for all types of emotional events. In this review, I outline the behavioral evidence for arousal's focal enhancements of memory and describe the neural processes that may support those focal enhancements. I also present behavioral evidence to suggest that these focal enhancements occur more often for negative experiences than for positive ones. This result appears to arise because of valence-dependent effects on the (...) neural processes recruited during episodic encoding and retrieval, with negative affect associated with increased engagement of sensory processes, and positive affect leading to enhanced recruitment of conceptual processes. (shrink)

This chapter examines the biopsychology of trauma and how it influences memory. It argues that trauma has identifiable effects on the hippocampus, impairing both the neuronal structure and the function of this brain region. As a direct consequence, stress impairs various forms of memory. However, not all memories suffer this effect, and the chapter seeks to explain this point by arguing that the experience of stress causes stressful events to be recorded in a fragmented manner, with the elements of the (...) event not woven into a coherent remembered episode. At the same time, emotion works to promote memory for the gist of an event, leading to well-encoded memories for the thematic content of an emotion event, but, again, without the coherent spatiotemporal framework needed to organize the memory. (shrink)