Movement-Anchored Emotional Memory: An Embodied Neuropsychological Framework

This article advances a clinically oriented neuropsychological framework and introduces the construct of movement-anchored emotional memory, proposing that bodily movement constitutes a core organizing dimension of emotional memory encoding, reactivation, and transformation. Integrating embodied cognition, affective and social neuroscience, developmental psychology, trauma research, and neuropsychology, emotional memory is conceptualized as emerging through dynamic coordination among sensorimotor, interoceptive, affective, relational, and contextual processes. Movement contributes temporal, spatial, and action-related structure to emotional experience and memory, through bodily rhythms, movement qualities and sensorimotor sequencing that link immediate experience to prior states and anticipated action. In trauma, disruption of this temporal integration may reduce past-present differentiation, sustaining defensive patterns in current experience. The article reviews the embodied neural foundations of emotional memory and examines the developmental emergence of movement-anchored emotional memory, trauma-related memory alterations, and embodied pathways for memory updating. Within a regulated relational context, reactivation and variation of movement patterns may introduce new sensorimotor and affective information, generating mismatch between expectations and current experience, creating conditions for reconsolidation. The framework highlights movement as a pathway for accessing and reorganizing embodied aspects of emotional memory. Clinical implications for the embodied processing of emotional memory extend to trauma treatment, affect regulation, and movement-based therapeutic practice.