Emotion's influence on memory for spatial and temporal context

Abstract

Individuals report remembering emotional items vividly. It is debated whether this report reflects enhanced memory accuracy or a bias to believe emotional memories are vivid. We hypothesised emotion would enhance memory accuracy, improving memory for contextual details. The hallmark of episodic memory is that items are remembered in a spatial and temporal context, so we examined whether an item's valence (positive, negative) or arousal (high, low) would influence its ability to be remembered with those contextual details. Across two experiments, high-arousal items were remembered with spatial and temporal context more often than low-arousal items. Item valence did not influence memory for those details, although positive high-arousal items were recognised or recalled more often than negative items. These data suggest that emotion does not just bias participants to believe they have a vivid memory; rather, the arousal elicited by an event can benefit memory for some types of contextual details.

Keywords:

• Affect
• Arousal
• Recognition
• Space
• Time
• Valence

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant MH080833 from the National Institute of Mental Health, by the American Federation for Aging Research, and by the Searle Scholars Program (grants to EAK). Portions of this research were conducted as the Senior Thesis of the first author (Expt. 2) or as the Independent Research Project of the second author (Expt. 1).

We thank Ranga Atapattu, Matthias Faeth, and Keely Muscatell for assistance with data collection and data management and for helpful discussion.

Notes

¹Consistent with prior research (Dougal et al., 2007; Kensinger & Schacter, 2006a; Sharot et al., 2004), emotion never influenced the ability to remember which decision had been made about the picture (accuracy ranged from 58–64% for all item types). Because the reasons why this type of decision may not be enhanced by emotion have been elaborated previously (e.g., Kensinger, 2007, 2009; Kensinger et al., 2007b), and because this detail is not a key feature of episodic memory in the same way that spatial and temporal specificity are requirements of episodic memory (see Clayton & Dickinson, 1998; Conway, 1992; Tulving, 1983), we do not further discuss memory for the “decision” attribute.