A matter of time: how does emotion influence temporal aspects of remembering?

ABSTRACT

Spatiotemporal context is an intrinsic aspect of episodic memory. Although a large literature has demonstrated that emotion enhances episodic memory, less research has considered whether and how emotion affects memory for the timing of an experience, despite theoretical and practical importance. In this review, we bridge three heavily researched cognitive domains – memory, emotion, and time – by discussing findings from a burgeoning literature on their intersection. We identify and review two broad ways in which memory for time has been conceptualised in the emotional memory literature, namely (1) memory for relative aspects of event timing (“when” an event detail occurred), which includes studies of temporal-order and source memory; and (2) memory for the time that elapsed during an event (“how long”), which includes studies of retrospective duration estimation. Emerging trends demonstrate that although temporal-order memory can be impaired or enhanced by emotion depending on study demands, temporal source memory, instead, is usually enhanced. Studies of duration memory show that the remembered duration of negative experiences is dilated, but it is less clear how duration memory is affected for positive events. These findings are considered under the lens of broader emotional memory literature theories, and directions for future research are proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• episodic memory
• temporal memory
• time

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Rebecca Todd and Omran Safi for their comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this case, it is notable that the direction of the item memory effect was opposite of the majority of the emotional memory literature, although we highlight that in this study, the critical comparison was high- versus low- arousal, not emotional versus neutral, the latter being more common in studies showing emotional enhancements for item memory.

2 A recent study by Hennings et al. (2021) found evidence of source misattribution such that conceptually related information encoded surrounding a fear conditioning event was misattributed to the fear conditioning source context. However, given the distinctiveness of this paradigm (e.g. the use of fear conditioning) we note this study in passing and not centrally in the review.

3 Other mechanisms may also be relevant to emotional effects on temporal memory, such as consolidation (reviewed recently in Todd et al., 2020) but since the majority of paradigms reviewed here use immediate memory tests, we do not discuss such delayed mechanisms in detail here.

4 Neutral items may also receive similar prioritization if they are highly relevant to one's goals (see Mather & Sutherland, 2011).

5 These paradigms also differ in their emphasis on assessing perception (prospective) versus long-term memory (retrospective), although both approaches likely tap into a multitude of mechanisms.

Additional information

Funding

A.S.P. is supported by a Mitacs Research Training Award and an Elizabeth Young Lacey Scholarship in Psychology, and D.J.P. is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2019-04596) and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (38817).