More than a feeling: Emotional cues impact the access and experience of autobiographical memories

Abstract

Remembering is impacted by several factors of retrieval, including the emotional content of a memory cue. Here we tested how musical retrieval cues that differed on two dimensions of emotion-valence (positive and negative) and arousal (high and low)-impacted the following aspects of autobiographical memory recall: the response time to access a past personal event, the experience of remembering (ratings of memory vividness), the emotional content of a cued memory (ratings of event arousal and valence), and the type of event recalled (ratings of event energy, socialness, and uniqueness). We further explored how cue presentation affected autobiographical memory retrieval by administering cues of similar arousal and valence levels in a blocked fashion to one half of the tested participants, and randomly to the other half. We report three main findings. First, memories were accessed most quickly in response to musical cues that were highly arousing and positive in emotion. Second, we observed a relation between a cue and the elicited memory's emotional valence but not arousal; however, both the cue valence and arousal related to the nature of the recalled event. Specifically, high cue arousal led to lower memory vividness and uniqueness ratings, but cues with both high arousal and positive valence were associated with memories rated as more social and energetic. Finally, cue presentation impacted both how quickly and specifically memories were accessed and how cue valence affected the memory vividness ratings. The implications of these findings for views of how emotion directs the access to memories and the experience of remembering are discussed.

Linguistic analysis of the autobiographical memories of individuals with major depressive disorder

“…We did not observe this for neutral or negative memories. This finding aligns with previous literature suggesting that depressed individuals use fewer positive emotion words than healthy controls [ 12 , 16 , 17 , 38 ] and aligns with theories that suggest depressed individuals have difficulty accessing mood-incongruent information and attending to positive stimuli [ 9 , 23 , 59 , 60 ].…”

“…Hence, it may be that depressed individuals perceive negative information as more salient and more relevant to the self and positive information as less salient and less relevant to the self. Further evidence of this relationship between self-focus and the use of the word “I” comes from research examining mood-congruent memory recall, which suggests that stimuli perceived as congruent with one’s current mood state are learned and remembered more often and more vividly than stimuli incongruent with one’s current mood state [ 58 – 60 ]. This effect has been shown to perpetuate the cycle of negative affect and negative memory recall in depressed individuals [ 61 ] and is particularly pronounced for information relating to the self [ 62 , 63 ], suggesting that in our study, depressed individuals may be perceiving negative memories in a mood-congruent manner while discounting positive memories, and this effect may be enhanced for AMs relating to the self.…”

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.…”

The Similarity Structure of Real-World Memories

“…Earlier mapping of the similarity structure of human autobiographical memory [Brown and Schopflocher, 1998] explicitly excluded affective annotations of participants' memories. Later work argued that personal relevance and emotional valence and arousal could be important for the clustering of life memories [Wright and Nunn, 2000], and that the valence of autobiographical memories affects how they are retrieved [Sheldon and Donahue, 2017]. The present data enabled us to demonstrate the importance of emotional properties of memories in a quantitative manner, comparing emotion against other theoretically prominent dimensions, such as the spatial, temporal and social features of memories.…”