Brain Scans Reveal How We 'Tag' Negative Memories

Why do certain objects instantly trigger a specific feeling? New research suggests our brains 'tag' memories with an emotional context, creating a shared history between otherwise unrelated events. Scientists explored this by scanning 33 participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they formed episodic memories—recollections of specific personal experiences.

During the experiment, participants viewed neutral objects paired with images evoking either negative or neutral emotions. Later, when shown the neutral objects again, the participants' brains implicitly recalled the emotional 'hue' of the original pairing. The data revealed a consistent pattern of activity in the ventral visual stream (VVS), a region typically associated with recognizing objects.

Crucially, this neural signature was most prominent for negative events. The findings indicate that the VVS helps encode a shared emotional signature, effectively grouping different negative memories together. While the hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex also played a nuanced role, the VVS provided the strongest evidence for this emotional tagging, highlighting the brain's flexible ability to organise information by feeling as well as fact.