Objective: to characterize the dimensions that structure the affectations that students experience when working with documents of memory and human rights of the Chilean dictatorship. Method: the research was implemented in high school students of a private school in Santiago de Chile. Based on grounded theory, a data corpus of 152 responses was analyzed by means of open and axial coding and categorical groupings. Results: the students experienced a diversity of affectations when they encountered different memory and human rights documents. Thus, participants manifested multiple feelings and emotions, such as anger, grief, fear, tranquility, joy or pride, which were provoked by the historical subjects, violence, spaces/places, events, information or ideas that were represented in the documents. Discussion and conclusions: the affectations experienced by the student group are structured from three dimensions: the narratives about the dictatorship that the young people developed from their national, community or family historical experiences; the humanization of the historical subjects when observing, listening to or reading the documents; the construction of a didactic context that recognized, made visible, and worked with the affectations.