0.5 How do emotion, attention, thought, and arousal work together  (Page 8/17)

If someone is trying to pay attention to something, and they are in the wrong emotional state, it may be harder to focus. For instance, if your emotional state is a happy one it may be harder for you to focus on something sad that is occurring. This gets even more complicated if you consider that the emotional state you are in is going to bring up memories related to that emotional state, which are also going to impact your ability to focus or pay attention to certain things. That being said, positive or negative emotions may help or hinder your ability to pay attention, depending on the type of emotion and the set of feelings it is, the memories or thoughts it brings up, and what you are paying attention to.

How does memory of ones past influence how someone thinks? First off, there are two types of memories that might influence thought, one is taxonomical categories (supplies, birds, sports) and the other is categories derived from goals (birthday gifts, camping equipment, things to do by the sea). Of course just regular memories of events could influence thought as well, but how exactly would that occur? If you are just thinking, "I want this for lunch", memories of certain items you wanted for lunch in the past may come up. Those would be a category that is goal related - each item in the goal related category is going to be goal related to a certain degree, some things more desirable than others. I doubt that when you think "I want this for lunch" that a memory of an event is brought up in your mind, it is more likely just items from the past are brought up.

That shows that a lot of your thought is derived from previous items that you have experience with. Your memories of your past aren't going to play an obvious, active role with most of your thinking. But maybe they do, if these memories are personally meaningful for you, then perhaps they influence your thinking in subtle ways. It obviously would if you bring up the memory and recall it while trying to think about something else, or recall the memory then do a related task.

Marks Marks, G. (1984). Thinking one's abilities are unique and one's opinions are common. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 10, 203-208. has shown that people tend to think that their opinions are widely shared and their abilities unique, underscoring the existence of a false idiosyncrasy effect or a uniqueness bias. During social interactions, people develop a need for enhancement that turns performances, reinforcements and other events into episodes associated to their cognitive, emotional or behavioral consequences, such as mood and self-esteem. So basically people are constantly striving to increase their self-esteem and mood, by comparing themselves to others, trying to help their own thoughts and emotions and behaviors, and continuously trying to reward themselves. This probably means that self-esteem is a key feature for autobiographic memory - when something that triggers the feeling of self-esteem or wants to start the feeling of self-esteem, memories of the persons personal history may help (and self-esteem is wanted or triggered frequently in life and in social interactions). That makes sense, when I want to feel good I can recall memories. I meant that it was used more automatically and in a more subtle way, however.