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Emotional Hangovers Are Real, Science Confirms

Researchers have found that your reaction to an emotional stimulus can affect the way you remember subsequent neutral events.

The holidays are a time for hangovers, but apparently not just alcohol-induced ones: According to new research by New York University, emotional hangovers are a very real thing.

The study, published by Nature Neuroscience, explains that your emotional state can affect the way you remember subsequent experiences. According to the study, it's known that "emotional events and stimuli are more robustly remembered, with higher levels of confidence, vividness and detail" when compared to neutral events. But this research indicates that there's a "hangover" effect from emotional events, meaning that lingering emotional arousal can make people recall neutral events more clearly.

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The NYU study made participants look at various images, all of which generated emotional reactions. About 10 to 30 minutes later, the researchers made some participants view images deemed "non-emotional," while other participants were asked to look at the non-emotional scenes, followed by emotional ones. Six hours after that, researchers made participants take a memory test involving the images they'd viewed hours earlier.

The study found that the subjects who'd seen the emotionally stimulating images first had better long-term recall of the neutral images. "Not only can emotional arousal following a neutral event influence the storage of that event but, to the extent that arousal persists, it can also influence memory for future neutral events," the researchers concluded.

Ultimately, the findings suggest that you're likely to remember non-emotional experiences more vividly if they happen after something particularly emotional, implying that the effects of having strong emotional experiences can carry on far longer than initially assumed.

"These findings make clear that our cognition is highly influenced by preceding experiences and, specifically, that emotional brain states can persist for long periods of time," Lila Davachi, a professor of psychology at NYU and senior author of the study, told Science Daily.

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But what does this mean for recollecting events in the more distant future? Davachi tells Broadly not that much. "We have no reason to believe that they [emotional experiences] are detrimental for memory," she says. According to Davachi, "Our data shows that the long-term memory benefit emerges with time and is not there immediately."

When asked about what this means for an emotionally turbulent time — like the holidays for example, she replies that it really depends on the individual. "It's possible that what counts as an emotional and arousing experience is always relative and with regard to our own personal baselines." Davachi explains, "so if the holidays are very emotional day after day, then that same level of emotion may not elicit arousal."