Negative emotional content disrupts the coherence of episodic memories.

ABSTRACT: Events are thought to be stored in episodic memory as coherent representations, in which the constituent elements are bound together so that a cue can trigger reexperience of all elements via pattern completion. Negative emotional content can strongly influence memory, but opposing theories predict strengthening or weakening of memory coherence. Across a series of experiments, participants imagined a number of person-location-object events with half of the events including a negative element (e.g., an injured person), and memory was tested across all within event associations. We show that the presence of a negative element reduces memory for associations between event elements, including between neutral elements encoded after a negative element. The presence of a negative element reduces

SUBMITTER: Bisby JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5784934 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature