Exploring the Facets of Emotional Episodic Memory: Remembering ‘What’, ‘When’, and ‘Which’

Abstract

Our memories can differ in quality from one event to the next and emotion is one important explanatory factor. Still, the manner in which emotion impacts episodic memory is complex: Whereas emotion enhances some aspects of an episodic memory—particularly the central aspects—it dampens memory for non-central information, such as spatial context. Extending this work, we examined the effect of emotion on another important element of an event, its temporal context. We tested the hypothesis that emotion would impair memory for “when” an event occurred. Human participants (N = 116) watched a series of short videos, wherein either a negative or neutral image was superimposed, followed by a test. In accordance with prior work, emotion enhanced and impaired memory, respectively, for “what” and “where”. Unexpectedly, emotion was associated with enhanced accuracy for “when.” By examining multiple features of episodic memory, we provide a holistic characterization of the myriad effects of emotion.

Episodic memory through a social and emotional lens.

“…Using a large, online cohort, the present study aimed to address this knowledge gap by directly examining the interplay of social and emotional cues on item and associative recognition memory. Consistent with several studies (e.g., Bisby et al, 2014;Bisby et al, 2018;Matsumoto & Kawaguchi, 2020;Palombo et al, 2021), we found that negative emotional content enhances item recognition memory while impairing associative recognition memory. To our knowledge, our study is the largest, most diverse sample to date to replicate this effect, underscoring the robustness of this finding.…”

“…Our observation of an emotional enhancement of item recognition memory but an emotional decrement of associative recognition memory is consistent with a robust body of literature (e.g., Kensinger, 2007;Bisby & Burgess, 2014;Palombo et al, 2021). One mechanism that may support these effects is attention; emotional stimuli tend to capture EMOTIONAL AND SOCIAL MEMORY and hold attention more so than neutral stimuli (e.g., Talmi, 2013), which may hinder the encoding of paired neutral stimuli.…”

“…However, emotion does not enhance all aspects of remembering. Indeed, negative emotion can, under some circumstances, diminish memory for stimuli surrounding salient negative items (i.e., associative memory; Bisby & Burgess, 2014;Madan et al, 2012;Caplan et al, 2019;Matsumoto & Kawaguchi, 2020;Palombo et al, 2021). For example, whereas someone is likely to remember seeing a snake poised to strike, they may have difficulty remembering details about the surrounding foliage (e.g., Kensinger, 2009).…”

Effects of familiar music exposure on deliberate retrieval of remote episodic and semantic memories in healthy aging adults

“…To ask whether mood and remote memory retrieval are associated, we will model both internal and external details as a function of mood (Palombo et al, 2020;Sheldon et al, 2020;Sheldon & Donahue, 2017;Simpson & Sheldon, 2019;. Detail type will be effect-coded such that the main effect of mood will represent the mean association of mood with retrieval averaged across internal and external details.…”

Exploring the generalisation of affect across related experiences: A study of affective bleed and memory precision

“…Although it is well-established that emotional stimuli are better remembered than neutral stimuli, there is also evidence that negative emotion can impair intentional association learning when the to-be-associated stimuli are unrelated (Touryan et al, 2007;Zimmerman & Kelley, 2010;Madan et al, , 2017aBisby & Burgess, 2014;Bisby et al, 2018;Caplan et al, 2019;Palombo et al, 2021). Notably, this occurs even when items are presented relatively slowly and sequentially and when there is sufficient evidence of item-memory but impaired association-memory (Madan et al 2017).…”