According to a study from the University of Waterloo, anxiety can help people to remember things. The study of undergraduate students found that manageable levels of anxiety actually aided people in being able to recall the details of events. It also found that when anxiety levels got too high or descended into fear, it could lead to the colouring of memories where people begin to associate otherwise neutral elements of an experience to the negative context.
There is an optimal level of anxiety that is going to benefit memory, high levels of anxiety can cause people to reach a tipping point, which impacts their memories and performance. The study saw 80 undergraduate students from the University of Waterloo (64 females) complete the experiment. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to a deep encoding instruction group while the other half were randomly assigned to a shallow encoding group. All participants completed the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales.
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 coloured by the emotion with which it was associated during encoding. Thinking about emotional events or about negative events might put the mind in a negative mindset that can change way of perceiving the environment.
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