Emotional arousal lingers in time to bind discrete episodes in memory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7149859 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Clewett (0000-0003-0026-8034, University of California, corresponding author), Mason Mcclay (0000-0002-6679-3096, University of California) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 97-116 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cognition & Emotion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0269-9931 • E-ISSN: 1464-0600 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02699931.2023.2295853 |
| PMID | 38271625 |
| OpenAlex | W4391214848 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 96 |
Temporal stability and change in neutral contexts can transform continuous experiences into distinct and memorable events. However, less is known about how shifting emotional states influence these memory processes, despite ample evidence that emotion impacts non-temporal aspects of memory. Here, we examined if emotional stimuli influence temporal memory for recent event sequences. Participants encoded lists of neutral images while listening to auditory tones. At regular intervals within each list, participants heard emotional positive, negative, or neutral sounds, which served as "emotional event boundaries" that divided each sequence into discrete events. Temporal order memory was tested for neutral item pairs that either spanned an emotional sound or were encountered within the same auditory event. Encountering a highly arousing event boundary led to faster response times for items encoded within the next event. Critically, we found that highly arousing sounds had different effects on binding ongoing versus ensuing sequential representations in memory. Specifically, highly arousing sounds were significantly more likely to enhance temporal order memory for ensuing information compared to information that spanned those boundaries, especially for boundaries with negative valence. These findings suggest that within aversive emotional contexts, fluctuations in arousal help shape the temporal organisation of events in memory
Active listening · Arousal · Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Emotional valence · Event-related potential · Time perception · Communication · Identity, Memory, and Therapy · Memory and Neural Mechanisms · Memory Processes and Influences · Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Psychology
Emotional events induce retrograde memory impairments on conceptually-related neutral events
Putting Emotional Memories in Context
Emotion enhances relative but not absolute temporal memory
Divergent modes of episodic organization underlie whether emotional learning enhances memory across event boundaries
Arousal and valence differentially shape temporal memory for naturalistic events
Take me back
Context familiarity speeds up boundary responses at encoding
Bridging space and time in relational memory
Negative emotion reduces the temporal compression of events in episodic memory
Temporal recall in the shadow of emotion
Emotional time travel
Performance
Mechanisms of emotional arousal and lasting declarative memory
Pupil Diameter and Load on Memory
Emotional Arousal and Memory Binding
Event boundaries in perception affect memory encoding and updating.
Arousal-Biased Competition in Perception and Memory
Memory and the hippocampus
Approach-Motivated Positive Affect Reduces Breadth of Attention
A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder
Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior
Remembering the Details
Cognitive neuroscience of emotional memory
Time changes
A matter of time
Retrieval context determines whether event boundaries impair or enhance temporal order memory
Effects of emotion on associative recognition
Memory for time and place contributes to enhanced confidence in memories for emotional events
Reconciling findings of emotion-induced memory enhancement and impairment of preceding items
Dissociating emotion-induced blindness and hypervision
Positive emotion enhances association-memory
Influence of Emotion on Memory for Temporal Information
Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires
Event segmentation protects emotional memories from competing experiences encoded close in time
Event perception
| Citations per year | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |