Title: How Stress Works With and Against Your Memory
Headings: How Stress Works With and Against Your Memory
How Stress Works With and Against Your Memory
Stress and Memory
Improve Your Memory Under Stress

Content: Stress can affect the type of memories we form as well. If we are stressed during an event, we may have more difficulty accurately remembering the details of the event later, as the stress we felt colors our perceptions as well as our ability to recall what we perceived at the time. This is part of why eye-witness testimony is so unreliable—people can be absolutely sure they saw something a certain way, but this doesn't mean that they are correct. Memories can also change after they are formed. In fact, every time we retrieve a memory, we color it with our present experience of it, like when we take something off a shelf and then put it back, leaving fingerprints from having handled it again. Research shows that if people are questioned and given misleading information about something they experienced, that information will color their memory and influence what they thought they experienced and that this information (because it is more recent than the event itself) is easier to recall. This is why false memories can be created with well-intentioned lines of questioning. 1 ﻿
A recent meta-analysis was conducted on 113 stress studies, meaning that researchers examined that many independent studies on stress and memory to determine what the major findings were. There is ample evidence that stress affects memory, and these studies just lent more support for that research: 2 ﻿
One of the most interesting findings was that stress could impede the formation of memories if it occurred prior to or during encoding, the time during which the memory is formed.