If it is true that stress may interfere with, your memory recovery (especially about events in the past, before the stressing event, or post-stress short-term memory) it is also true that highly emotional stressing situations implement the memory. That's why there are post-traumatic stress disorders. People that suffered highly stressing situations, like personal losses, warfare situations, natural disasters, sometimes cannot forget those events and become highly disturbed - they keep reviving those events.
I agree with you Luz.
In fact many studies have shown that the 're-living' aspects of PSDM are more profound and intense, in other words, more unpleasant, than the original trauma. The soldier returning from the battlefield experiences all kinds of stresses and traumas in all areas of his life, that were unknown and irrelevant in the midst of the fight, when he was simply fighting for his life and focused entirely on that. A mark of how our response to an event is an evolving process, in terms of types of stress, how that stress is manifest in different circumstances, and of the different stages of memory.
There was a study performed recently in which participants watched videos of unpleasant events that they had lived through. Brain function measured in each instance to compare the different responses. It turned out that watching the video of the events produced a far higher degree of arousal - in other words, a strong negative physical reaction - than the reaction to the real-life event.
