Emotional stimuli (e.g. words, images) are often remembered better than neutral stimuli. However, little is known about how memory is affected by an environmentally induced emotional state (without any overtly emotional occurrences) – the focus of this study. Participants were randomly assigned to discovery (n = 305) and replication (n = 306) subsamples and viewed a desktop virtual environment before rating their emotions and completing objective (i.e. item, temporal-order, duration) and subjective (e.g. vividness, sensory detail, coherence) memory measures. In both (...) samples, a Partial Least Squares Correlation analysis showed that an emotional state characterised by high negative emotion (i.e. threat, fear, anxiety) and arousal was reliably associated with better memory in both objective (i.e. item) and subjective (i.e. vividness and sensory detail) domains. No reliable associations were observed for any temporal memory measures (objective or subjective). Thus, an environmentally induced state of negative emotion corresponds with enhanced memory for indices of episodic memory pertaining to “what” happened, but not necessarily “when” it happened. (shrink)

Remembering when emotional experiences occurred can be adaptive, yet there is no consensus on how emotion influences temporal aspects of memory. Temporal memory, a type of associative memory, refers to the capacity to encode, store, and retrieve information about the sequence and timing of events. This Special Issue presents evidence on how emotion affects three aspects of temporal memory: temporal-order, temporal source, and event segmentation. The contributions suggest that emotion often increases temporal-order memory, a result that is harder to reconcile (...) with some dominant emotional memory theories, including the Object-Based Framework, the Dual Representation Account or other trade-off models, but may fit with Arousal-Biased Competition theory. The contributions also suggest that emotion can act as a boundary between events, although only under some experimental set-ups. Findings regarding its effect on temporal source memory were less clear. We discuss the diversity of findings in light of theories of emotional associative memory and methodological factors, such as the direction of the shift in emotional experience and discrepancies between temporal-order and temporal distance measures as indices of event boundaries. We provide a roadmap for future studies aimed at understanding how emotion shapes the fate of our memories as they unfold in time. (shrink)