Out-of-body experience favors emotional memory consolidation
Konstantinos Christos Daoultzis, Sophie Alida Bogemann, Yoshiyuki Onuki, Martijn Meeter, Ysbrand van der Werf
Ψυχολογία: το Περιοδικό της Ελληνικής Ψυχολογικής Εταιρείας July 25, 2022 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.12681/psy_hps.25576 via DOAJ
Summary
Out-of-body experiences (OBE) enhance emotional memory consolidation and increase skin temperature. Participants were tested on their recognition of emotional pictures after experiencing OBE, with results indicating improved memory performance linked to these experiences. This supports the idea that body ownership and emotion are interconnected, as evidenced by a rise in skin temperature during the process. Future research is suggested to clarify other factors that might influence these findings.
Study at a glance
| Design | experimental study |
|---|---|
| Population | participants who experienced out-of-body experiences |
| Key finding | OBE favour emotional memory consolidation and cause a temperature increase. |
Abstract
Body ownership reflects our ability to recognise our body at a certain location, enabling us to interact with the world. Emotion has a strong impact on memory and body ownership; interestingly, skin temperature may at least in part mediate this impact. Previous studies have found that out-of-body experiences (OBE) impair memory encoding and cause skin temperature to drop. In the present study a new method for inducing OBE was designed and their impact on a different stage and type of memory processing (emotional memory consolidation) and on skin temperature was investigated. In our experiment, we presented three types of emotional pictures (neutral, pleasant, unpleasant) before inducing OBE and testing our participants’ recognition memory in a retrieval session. Throughout the whole experiment, both neck and hand skin temperature were measured using iButtons. Participants’ performance was calculated using d-prime and statistical analyses included one-way ANOVA, probing the relationship between the score on the OBE questionnaire, performance and skin temperature; we also compared the differences between the experimental and a control group. Results showed that OBE favour emotional memory consolidation and cause a temperature increase, supporting the embodied cognition theory as proposed by Anderson (2003). Future studies should expand our findings, to rule out that participants experiencing OBE could have a better memory at baseline or that temperature could be increased due to other reasons.