Emotion Enhances Memory for the Sequential Unfolding of a Naturalistic Experience

The events of our lives unfold across time. When remembering these events, we often reference information about when they occurred and their sequential unfolding. How does emotion affect our ability to reconstruct in memory the elements of an event in the correct temporal order? The present study explored this question using naturalistic stimuli. Human participants (N = 276) saw movie clips that varied in emotion (high versus low). Later, participants were asked to reconstruct the events in the order they encoded them. Participants’ temporal-order memory was better in the high- versus low-emotion condition. Analysis of free-recall data showed that participants remembered the high-emotion clip with greater vividness, yet the consistency of details did not differ between conditions. Our findings shed novel light on the multifaceted effects of emotion on memory, suggesting that highly emotional events can be reconstructed with greater temporal fidelity. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications.