Autobiographical Memory: How Emotion Influences the Details Recalled
A wealth of research suggests that emotion enhances memory. Yet, emotion does not uniformly enhance all aspects of memory. The goal of the present study was to examine the effects of emotion on mnemonic detail production for real-world, autobiographical memories (AM). Building on prior work that suggests emotion enhances memory for sensory/perceptual details, we hypothesized that emotional events would contain more perceptually-related details than neutral events. We used a paradigm modified from St. Jacques & Levine (2007), administering the Autobiographical Interview (AI; Levine et al., 2002) to 56 participants. The AI is a semi-structured protocol that parses episodic AM details into specific categories (event, perceptual, thoughts, time, place). Participants recalled memories that were positive, negative, and neutral from a recent (≲3 months old) and remote (~1-5 years old) time period, with the resulting narratives classified into the AI categories. Our results showed that the recollection of perceptual details did not differ for emotional versus neutral AMs at either retention interval. By contrast, emotion affected memory for other types of episodic details, contingent on retention interval and valence. Our findings further enrich our understanding of the intricacy and nuance of emotional memory, complementing studies using other laboratory or naturalistic approaches.