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.

Memories of our personal past are not exact accounts of what occurred. Instead, memory reconstructs the past in adaptive–though not always faithful–ways. Using a naturalistic design, here we asked how the visual perspective adopted in the mind’s eye when recalling the past–namely an “own” eyes versus “observer” perspective–relates to the stability of autobiographical memories. We hypothesized that changes in visual perspective over time would predict poorer consistency of memories. Human participants (N=178) rated the phenomenology of and freely recalled self-selected memories of everyday events at two time points (10 weeks apart). Multilevel linear modeling revealed, as expected, that greater shifts in visual perspective over time predicted lower memory consistency, particularly for emotional details. Our results offer insight into the factors that predict the fidelity of memories for everyday events. Moreover, our results may elucidate new metrics that are useful in interpreting eye-witness testimony or experiences relayed in clinical contexts.

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.