Affective Memory

There are two types of affective memory; sense and emotion, in both cases Stanislavsky uses these memories from past events and transfers them into the present so they can be reused within a scene to recreate how it made you feel emotionally and what you experienced via your senses.

Emotion Memory - Emotion memory is used so actors are able to show truthful and believable emotions on stage, for this to happen these emotions need to be unlocked from within yourself and not made up, anything made up that isn't felt will seem fake and untrue to reality. Stanislavsky believed that it was more effective to recall emotions from an event that happened a long time ago as he thought the the distance created by time would help to create a stronger and more refined idea of how it made you feel, as he said it was a "splendid filter for remembered feelings". From experience and the exercise we did in class, this does seem like a valuable concept. When recalling how getting my acceptance letter for Brit made me feel, I did find that as so much time had past I was only left with the most significant emotions of that event as those were the ones that dominated how i felt at the time. Other smaller pieces of emotional information that came about within the background had been lost as they were no longer relevant due to the passing of time and therefore changing of the situation. These memories don't have to be direct to you that you experience, instead it could be something you heard or saw as long as it triggered an emotional response.

Sense Memory - 
Sense memory plays to the 5 senses; touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight. Instead of an emotional recall, sense memory is the recalling of how the physical aspects of the event, for example: what could you hear, see, taste and smell as well as what did it feel like when you touched various things. This allows you to build a picture of the setting that these emotions occurred in, therefore allowing the emotions felt to become more real and truthful.