Emotional dissociations in temporal associations: opposing effects of arousal on memory for details surrounding unpleasant events

ABSTRACT

Research targeting emotion’s impact on relational episodic memory has largely focused on spatial aspects, but less is known about emotion’s impact on memory for an event’s temporal associations. The present research investigated this topic. Participants viewed a series of interspersed negative and neutral images with instructions to create stories linking successive images. Later, participants performed a surprise memory test, which measured temporal associations between pairs of consecutive pictures where one picture was negative and one was neutral. Analyses focused on how the order of negative and neutral images during encoding influenced retrieval accuracy. Converging results from a discovery study (N = 72) and pre-registered replication study (N = 150) revealed a “forward-favouring” effect of emotion in temporal memory encoding: Participants encoded associations between negative stimuli and subsequent neutral stimuli more strongly than associations between negative stimuli and preceding neutral stimuli. This finding may reflect a novel trade-off regarding emotion’s effects on memory and is relevant for understanding affective disorders, as key clinical symptoms can be conceptualised as maladaptive memory retrieval of temporal details.

KEYWORDS:

• Arousal
• associative/relational memory
• temporal
• ordering
• source memory

Acknowledgments

This research was carried out in part at the University of Illinois’ Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology. During the preparation of this manuscript, P.C.B. was supported by a Dissertation Completion Fellowship provided by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. F.D. was supported by an Emanuel Donchin Professorial Scholarship in Psychology from the University of Illinois. The authors wish to thank members of the Dolcos Lab (Yuta Katsumi, Margaret O'Brien, Michael Budianto, Grace Lucenti, Jageesha Ghosh, Mindy Lin, Jiaying Ning, JulieAnn Scherer, & Chen Shen) for help with stimulus creation.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The instructional materials given to participants, analytic code, and replication study data have been uploaded to a public repository (https://github.com/paulcbogdan/EmoTemporal).

Notes

1 The pre-registration form also details one additional hypothesis related to the item memory and spatial relational memory tests, whereby emotion was expected to yield more trials where participants had accurate responses to both tests. This hypothesis was confirmed (t[132] = 3.27, p = .001, d_z = .28), but this result was planned for a separate report. This finding replicates and extends results by Bogdan et al. (2023), which challenge evidence of impaired relational memory by emotion (Bisby and Burgess, 2017).

2 Two participants did not respond to the success ratings prompts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.