Recently in Journals Category

I found this interesting article about how religion can play a key role in your emotions. It sites where others have given religious approaches to emotion regulation such as envy, anger, pride and other potentially destructive emotions. It also explains that religion can also help with dealing with guilt and depression. I know that for some this can be a difficult topic to talk about, but I feel that religion can play a key role in your emotional well being. I have seen this first hand through several of my close friends. I have seen people go through some very difficult situations and they themselves can say that they would not have made it through if they didn't believe in something greater than themselves. And I am sure that many of you can attest to knowing someone in the same situation or you may have felt to same way at some point in your life.

The link is of a very long article but you can choose to go to the section on religion and emotion by clicking on a drop down menu
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145024?amp;searchHistoryKey=%24{searchHistoryKey}&cookieSet=1#h7

We all know that sleep greatly impacts our mood on a day-to-day basis. We also know that sleep before a test is probably more beneficial than an extra couple hours of cramming. However, we may not know that sleep may play a key role in selecting which memories are preserved. Researchers from Harvard and Boston College have data supporting their claim that sleep helps preserve and enhance memories that create a greater emotional response within a person. Previous research has demonstrated that sleep plays an important role in procedural memory but this study establishes a better understanding of emotional memory formation connected to sleep.

The actual study only used 88 college students, meaning that more research needs to be done in this area to have a representative sample but we all know that psychology is based off of the college psychology major or freshman. Participants were shown a picture with a car parked on a street in front of shops(neutral) or a badly crashed car parked on a similar street (negatively arousing). Then they were tested on their memory of these pictures, both background and central object. Participants were divided into three groups for memory testing, 12 hours after viewing spent awake during the day, 12 hours after the viewing at night including sleep or 30 minutes after the viewing. They found that the negative scene was largely forgotten if the person stayed awake but if they slept the negative scene was preserved in almost the same detail as the group tested 30 minutes after the viewing.

While I was reading this article I was thinking a lot about how this research can be paired with other areas of research such as eyewitness testimony and the cross-race effect.  This could be one more thing that lawyers and juries have to consider in the court room.

Here are links to two articles discussing the research:

http://www.harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/researchers-find-sleep-selectively-preserves-emotional-memories

http://www.4therapy.com/consumer/conditions/article/9509/112/A+Night%92s+Sleep+Gives+Emotional+Memories+Their+Staying+Power

Here is a link to the actual article:

Payne, J. D., Stickgold, R., Swanberg, K., Kensinger, E. A. (2008). Sleep preferentially enhances memory for emotional components of scenes. Psychological Science, 19(8), 781-788.

http://www2.bc.edu/~kensinel/Payne_PS08.pdf

A journal that publishes empirical and theoretical work on motivation and emotion.

http://www.springer.com/psychology/journal/11031