Anxiety may help remember things: Study
Manageable levels of anxiety can actually help you remember more details of an event, claimed a study. The study of 80 undergraduate students also found that when anxiety levels got too high or descended into fear, it could lead to the coloring of memories where people begin to associate otherwise neutral elements of an experience to the negative context. Here's more on the study.
People with high anxiety need to be careful
"People with high anxiety have to be careful," said Myra Fernandes, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. "To some degree, there is an optimal level of anxiety that is going to benefit your memory, but we know from other research that high levels of anxiety can cause people to reach a tipping point, which impacts their memories and performance," said Fernandes.
What else did the study reveal?
For the study half of the participants were assigned to a deep encoding instruction group while the other half were assigned to a shallow encoding group. It was discovered that individuals high in anxiety showed a heightened sensitivity to the influences of emotional context on their memory, with neutral information becoming tainted, or colored by the emotion with which it was associated during encoding.
