Schedule of Events | Symposia

Cognitive reappraisal influences the organization of emotional episodes in memory

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Bailey Harris¹ (baileybharris@ucla.edu), Mason McClay¹, David Clewett¹; ¹University of California, Los Angeles

Fluctuations in emotional states regulate a dynamic interplay between memory integration and separation, shaping the organization of distinct episodes in memory. Evidence suggests that a shift towards negative emotions may initiate event segmentation processes, leading to greater separation between memories of adjacent events. Here, we examined if emotion regulation strategies can modify these divisive effects of negative emotions. Participants viewed sequences of neutral objects interspersed with a single negative image and were cued to either reappraise their emotional response or passively view those images. Event segmentation was operationalized as impairments in temporal order memory and expanded distance ratings between different neutral object pairs in the sequences. As expected, passively viewing a negative image elicited event segmentation in memory, with emotion-spanning pairs rated farther apart in time and recalled with lower order accuracy than pairs spanning only neutral objects. However, contrary to our hypothesis, greater reappraisal success for the specific negative images also predicted increased memory separation effects. Alongside these behavioral results, pupillometry revealed two distinct features of negative image-evoked pupil dilations that were associated with either passively experiencing negative responses or cognitively reappraising them. Further, analyses of individual differences showed that a stronger tendency to segment memories during passive-viewing trials versus reappraisal trials was correlated with lower overall ratings of positive affect. Together, these findings suggest that there may be separate emotional and cognitive routes to facilitating event segmentation in memory, with negative emotions potentially inducing a maladaptive form of memory fragmentation that relates to poor mental health.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions