Schedule of Events | Symposia

Neural signature of emotional context

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Chantelle Cocquyt¹ (ccocquyt@psych.ubc.ca), Isabel Wilson¹, Daniela Palombo¹; ¹University of British Columbia

Emotions shape episodic memories, with emotional context—the affective quality or “hue” of an experience—persisting as part of these events in memory, scaffolding connections between events and guiding impressions of our environment. We suggest that events encoded in a similar emotional context also share similar patterns of brain activation during retrieval. To explore this idea, we scanned 33 participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging as they completed a two-phase episodic memory task. In the encoding phase, participants viewed trial-unique pairs of images, each of which included a neutral object presented alongside a complex picture that evoked a negative or neutral emotional context. Across conditions, images were tightly matched on low-level perceptual features. During the retrieval phase, participants were shown only the neutral objects again and rated their pleasantness, implicitly recalling their emotional context. To determine whether there is a neural signature that reflects salient emotional contexts, we used trial-level representational similarity analyses, focusing on three brain areas previously linked to emotional memory retrieval: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), hippocampus, and ventral visual stream. Results suggest that the ventral visual stream (bilaterally) represents emotional context, recapitulating patterns of encoding activation and reflecting a common signature of emotional context across retrieval trials. Meanwhile, the vmPFC and hippocampus appear to have a more nuanced role in representing emotional context. These findings reveal that content with a shared emotional context evokes patterns of brain activity that capture the gist of their emotional history, highlighting the brain’s flexible ability to integrate affective content into mnemonic representations.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic