No abstract

A wealth of research suggests that emotion enhances memory. Yet, this enhancement is not uniform. While some theories posit that emotion enhances memory for sensory/perceptual information, such an enhancement has not been observed in mnemonic detail production. However, a focus on remote events (often more semanticized) may be masking an effect. Focusing on perceptual details, we examined the effects of emotion on mnemonic detail, sampling both remote and recent autobiographical events. We administered the Autobiographical Interview, a protocol that parses autobiographical details into categories (perceptual, event, emotion/thoughts, place, and time). Participants (N = 56) recalled memories that were positive, negative, and neutral from recent (≲3 months old) and remote (~1–5 years old) time periods. Recollection of perceptual details did not differ for emotional versus neutral memories at either retention interval. However, emotion affected memory for other detail types, contingent on time period. Our findings enrich our understanding of the nuance of emotional memory.

In a complex world, we are constantly faced with environmental stimuli that shape our moment‐to‐moment experiences. But just as rich and complex as the external world is the internal milieu—our imagination. Imagination offers a powerful vehicle for playing out hypothetical experiences in the mind's eye. It allows us to mentally time travel to behold what the future might bring, including our greatest desires or fears. Indeed, imagined experiences tend to be emotion‐laden. How and why are humans capable of this remarkable feat? Based on psychological findings, we highlight the importance of imagination for emotional aspects of cognition and behavior, namely in the generation and regulation of emotions. Based on recent cognitive neuroscience work, we identify putative neural networks that are most critical for emotional imagination, with a major focus on the default mode network. Finally, we briefly highlight the possible functional implications of individual differences in imagination. Overall, we hope to address why humans have the capacity to simulate hypothetical emotional experiences and how this ability can be harnessed in adaptive (and sometimes maladaptive) ways. We end by discussing open questions.

The ability to create an accurate mental survey representation, or cognitive map, when moving through an environment varies widely across individuals, and we are still trying to understand the origins of these individual differences. Non-immersive virtual environments used to test for cognitive map accuracy in the laboratory have shown sex differences with a performance advantage for men in some studies but not others. When sex differences are demonstrated, it is unclear whether women’s performance generalizes to familiar and unfamiliar real-world environments. In Experiment 1, 98 participants explored the virtual environment Silcton and afterwards estimated directions between the landmarks in Silcton and arranged landmarks found in Silcton on a map. In addition, they reported frequently visited real-world locations and then estimated directions between them and drew a map of the locations. Men were more accurate on tests of Silcton than women were, although there was no difference between sexes for accuracy with real-world locations. Within sexes, women were more accurate with the real-world locations than Silcton, while men showed the opposite pattern. In Experiment 2, 21 women were tested with Silcton and their familiar real-world locations as in Experiment 1 but were also walked through an unfamiliar real-world area on campus and completed direction estimation and map drawing tests for the new environment. Overall, women were more accurate with the two real-world environments than Silcton, with some evidence that accuracy with the new real-world environment was more accurate than the familiar real-world locations. Overall, women’s ability to create a cognitive map of a virtual environment in the laboratory does not seem to be indicative of their ability to do the same in the real world, and care should be taken when generalizing lab results with virtual environments.

A wealth of research suggests that emotion enhances memory. Yet, the relationship between emotion and memory is complex and nuanced, as emotion does not uniformly enhance all aspects of memory. The goal of the present study was to examine the effects of emotion on real- world, autobiographical memories (AM), with a specific focus on elucidating the types of mnemonic details affected. Building on prior work that suggests that emotion may enhance memory for sensory/perceptual details specifically, we sought to explore which specific characteristics of AM may be enhanced by emotion. We used a paradigm modified from St. Jacques & Levine (2007), where we administered the Autobiographical Interview (AI; Levine et al., 2002), a semi-structured protocol that parses episodic AM details into specific categories (event, perceptual, thoughts, time, place), at two time points. In an initial session, participants recalled memories that were positive, negative, and neutral from a recent (≲3 months old) and remote (~1-5 years old) time period, with the resulting narratives classified into the abovementioned categories. One year later, a subset of these participants were asked to recall their recent events again, with the resulting narratives classified and compared to the corresponding initial recall. Our results showed that the recollection of perceptual details did not differ for emotional versus neutral AMs. By contrast, emotion affected memory for other types of episodic details, contingent on retention interval and valence. Our findings further enrich our understanding of the intricacy and nuance of emotional memory, complementing studies using other laboratory or naturalistic approaches.