Question

A psychology discussion:

Does your mood affect your memory, perceptions, or expectations? Has stress ever helped you remember or forget something? Have you ever tried to stop remembering or thinking about something? What happened? Why?

Answer 1

Researches had shown that that Mood affects our Memory. Mood is a state of Mind which is temporary. It influences our behaviour. People can be in Good mood if things happen to be in their favor or in Bad mood under adverse situations. Research shows that the mood we are in at the time of creating or encoding a memory impacts the recall value of it. There are more chances for us to remember happy events, words, and faces if we are happy at the time. Similarly for sad moods, we remember negative information better when our emotions are gloomy.

Your moods can shape the way you percieve the world. When you are in happy mood that happiness outweights the disturbances in most cases. But when you are in sad mood the dim or gloomy state of mind can magnify even the small disturbances and irritate you. In some researches, it is shown that your way of  processing of information and your choice of what to perceive, seems to be affected by whether you’re happy or sad.

Being hopeful also depends on your moods, if you are happy you are most likely be hopeful about certain outcomes but if you are sad then your thoughts incline towrds negativity.

Stress can help the immediate recall of short term memory but it hinders the recalling ability of long-term memory. Chronic stress can baffle the memory recalling abilities.

Example - During final year project eventhough preparation is good, because of stress our team not able to recall some of the topics while presenting it. In some other situations students who don't sleep does nightouts on the night before the presentation become stressful and they might recall the topics during the presentation but once that was over and the stress holding the memory was released then they forget the topics.

Once I was writing a script and doing a character study of one of the historical characters. The study was very extensive and deep that even after the script was completed I kept on referring that character and all characters I wrote started behaving like that historic figure. So I needed to get out of that character influence. I got rid of all material that I gathered and went out on a trip to clear my head. After that with new experiences and works I came out of that character influence. If we occupy our brain with new information and experiences slowly older ones might fade away. After a few days we might forget about them atleast partially or completely. The recalling ability of any thing depends upon consistency of our practice on recalling it. If we are not consistent in practice we might loose the ability to recall and forget that information or get out of touch with certain things.