Take me back: how the temporal relationship between cues shapes emotional memory retrieval

Emotionally intense events, such as those involving fear, anger, sadness, or joy, rarely occur in isolation. Instead, they are embedded within neutral moments, creating a dynamic, interconnected narrative. This study examined how the temporal dynamics of emotion shape what neutral content "carries" about an emotional experience via a unique paradigm designed to probe memory for different facets of an event, including specificity, emotionality, and temporal order. During an encoding phase, participants sequentially encoded image triplets: a neutral before-object, a negative or neutral middle-scene, and a neutral after-object, then rated the emotional valence of the middle-scene. Next, participants completed a retrieval phase wherein they were presented with either the before or after cue and asked questions regarding their memory for the triplet containing that object. Results across two independent samples largely converged in their findings that cueing with after content improved specificity, precision, and emotional integrity when retrieving a negative event. Results from the temporal-order memory task suggested a potential response bias, wherein participants indicated that the object on the screen was presented after the associated scene, regardless of valence. Our study provides new insights into how humans can form and subsequently retrieve a dynamic, interconnected narrative from significant life experiences.