Effects of brief mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation on associative memory for sad events: A registered report

Negative emotion can enhance memory for emotional items while impairing the associative binding and coherence of episodic events. We tested whether a brief combined mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation induction could attenuate sadness-related memory costs for multielement social events. Following preregistration, 113 young adults completed a 20-min mindfulness/loving-kindness meditation induction or matched active control, and 106 were retained for analysis after preregistered exclusions. Participants encoded events composed of a sad or neutral face, an object, and a scene, then completed a four-alternative forced-choice associative memory test and emotional ratings for faces and events. Sad events were remembered less accurately and less coherently than neutral events. However, the mindfulness/loving-kindness meditation induction did not reliably attenuate these memory costs. Bayesian analyses favored the null for associative memory accuracy and remained inconclusive for memory coherence. The intervention also did not reliably modulate emotional responses to sad versus neutral material. Emotional ratings revealed a dissociation between stimulus levels: Sad faces showed the aversive profile, whereas ratings of events were more mixed, suggesting that contextualized social sadness may carry a more complex meaning than a simple aversive cue. These findings identify boundary conditions for brief contemplative inductions and suggest that memory coherence may be an informative end point for future work on emotional memory integration. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).