The RUB news portal reports:

When the brain stores memories of objects, it generates a characteristic activity pattern for each of them. Stress changes these memory traces.

Stressful experiences are usually better remembered than neutral experiences. Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) have investigated why this is so. With the help of fictitious job interviews, they put people in stressful situations and then recorded their memory of objects from the job interview. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, they analysed brain activity while the participants saw the objects again. Memories of objects from stressful situations seem to be based on similar brain activity as memories of the stress trigger itself.

Full original article of the RUB (german): >>

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Scientific paper: >>