Nature & Nurture #148: Dr. Holly Bowen - Emotion, Motivation, & Memory

Dr. Holly Bowen is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Southern Methodist University.             Dr. Bowen’s research focuses on how affective states, specifically emotion and motivation, influence how we form memories and remember past experiences. She is also interested in how the links between emotion, motivation and memory are impacted by age-related cognitive changes, using multiple methods including behavioral paradigms, computational modeling, and neuroimaging with event-related potentials (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this episode Holly and I discuss emotion and motivation’s impact on memory encoding and consolidation, the differences between emotional valence verses arousal and their neurophysiology, and their connections to the reward system, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. We talk about dual-systems models of reward processing, cognitive control, and decision-making, the role of dopamine in facilitating learning and memory, the role of norepinephrine and cortisol in threat processing and fear conditioning, and paradoxes in how brain activity and behavior changes with age. Lastly, we discuss the negativity bias in memory, the positivity bias in nostalgia, and how socioemotional selectivity and changes in emotion regulation skills may explain age-related changes in these phenomena.