Everyone has heard of the hangover, it is that sluggish feeling after drinking too much alcohol- A group of psychologists now contend that emotional experiences can induce physiological and internal brain states that persist for long periods of time after the emotional events have ended.

In other words, your emotions can cause a hangover. 

This has an element of common sense. Most people at some time or another have felt "drained" after emotional experiences, and we remember them, because emotional experiences are better remembered than non-emotional ones. In the new study, the psychologists found that non-emotional experiences that followed emotional ones were also better remembered on a later memory test.

Subjects viewed a series of scene images that contained emotional content and elicited arousal. Approximately 10 to 30 minutes later, one group then also viewed a series of non-emotional, ordinary scene images. Another group of subjects viewed the non-emotional scenes first followed by the emotional ones. Both physiological arousal, measured in skin conductance, and brain activity, using fMRI, were monitored in both groups of subjects. Six hours later, the subjects were administered a memory test of the images previously viewed. 

The results showed that the subjects who were exposed to the emotion-evoking stimuli first had better long-term recall of the neutral images subsequently presented compared to the group who were exposed to the same neutral images first, before the emotional images.

It's fMRI, which may be a go-to for psychology papers but isn't valid scientifically. Still, data showed that the brain states associated with emotional experiences carried over for 20 to 30 minutes and influenced the way the subjects processed and remembered future experiences that are not emotional.