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Sketchpad Series

Inter-Event Shifts in Emotional Valence Shape Event Memory Representations

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

Samira Tavassoli¹ (stavass1@jh.edu), Janice Chen¹; ¹Johns Hopkins University

Studies on human episodic memory have demonstrated that emotional context shapes how we mentally encode and recall events (Dev et al., 2022; Cliver et al., 2024). However, there have been no studies to date that explore how changes in the emotional context of events within a cohesive narrative affect memory. In this study, we are exploring how the emotional flow of a narrative—i.e., the pacing of shifts in emotional valence between adjacent events—affects event order memory, event segmentation, and recall accuracy. We created three different versions of one story by reordering the sentences such that they had “fast,” “medium,” and “slow” emotional flows, while keeping the literal words the same; independent ratings confirmed that these versions were identical in perceived comprehensibility, chronologicity, cohesiveness, surprisingness, and immersiveness. In a preliminary experiment examining the relationship between emotional flow and event order memory, subjects (N=96) were assigned to one story condition, read the story, then completed a modified free recall task and an event timing estimation task. We found that faster flowing emotional contexts seemingly enhance representations of events’ chronology; subjects in our fast flow condition spontaneously recalled story details more in their original order of presentation (p<0.001) and more accurately estimated when events occurred within the story timeline (p<0.05) than the slow and medium flow groups. In a series of ongoing experiments, we are investigating the neural mechanisms that may drive the observed influence of emotional flow on event memory, focusing on how emotional valence shifts impact neural and behaviorally-indicated event boundaries.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic