SMART Volunteering-Storytelling Guide

II How to transmit emotions to connect with your audience? How to use emotions in order to tell a story that will be remembered? As we said in the second part focused on emotions, they are a great way of keeping an event, a situation, a story or even a person to stick to your brain like glue. Emotional memory adds credibility to the notion that thoughts can trigger emotion just as the activation of emotion can create cognitions (Lerner & Keltner, 2000; Lewis, 2008). A normal function of emotion is to enhance memory in order to improve recall of experiences that have importance or relevance for our survival. Emotion acts like a highlighter pen that emphasizes certain aspects of experiences to make them more memorable. Memory formation involves registering information (encoding), processing and storage, and retrieval. Emotion affects all the phases of memory formation. The following phases should be taken into account for writing and telling a good story: • Attention : Emotional intensity acts to narrow the scope of attention so that a few objects are emphasized at the expense of many others. Focusing upon a very narrow area allows for an optimal use of our limited attentional capacity. Therefore, telling a story that’s emotionally charged will keep people’s attention focused on the message. • Consolidation of a memory : Most of the information we acquire is forgotten and never makes it into long-term memory. Emotionally charged stories are remembered better than those of neutral events. The stress hormones, epinephrine and cortisol, enhances memory and consolidates memory contents. In evolutionary terms, it’s logical for us to imprint dangerous situations with extra clarity so that we may avoid them in the future. • Duration neglect (Peak-End rule): The way we remember events is not necessarily made up of a total of every individual moment. Instead, we tend to remember and overemphasize the peak (best or worst) moment and the last moment and neglect the duration of an experience. This explains why normally the bad ending ruins the whole experience. Thus, an emotional conclusion to our story can have a powerful, long-lasting impact on audiences. In sum, much of learning takes place in the form of emotional learning. To make our memory stronger, it helps to attach emotional significance to objects and actions we experience as well as to the stories we tell. -8-