Emotion and autobiographical memory

Abstract

Autobiographical memory encompasses our recollections of specific, personal events. In this article, we review the interactions between emotion and autobiographical memory, focusing on two broad ways in which these interactions occur. First, the emotional content of an experience can influence the way in which the event is remembered. Second, emotions and emotional goals experienced at the time of autobiographical retrieval can influence the information recalled. We discuss the behavioral manifestations of each of these types of interactions and describe the neural mechanisms that may support those interactions. We discuss how findings from the clinical literature (e.g., regarding depression) and the social psychology literature (e.g., on emotion regulation) might inform future investigations of the interplay between the emotions experienced at the time of retrieval and the memories recalled, and we present ideas for future research in this domain.

Introduction

A large proportion of memory research has followed the “verbal learning tradition” (e.g., [408], [409]), assessing the number of unrelated words that individuals can learn and the period of time over which they can retain the information. Yet when we use the word “memory” colloquially, we are generally referring not to our ability to intentionally memorize disconnected bits of information but rather to our ability to remember past experiences in a coherent fashion. “Autobiographical memory” is a term that fits well with this colloquial use of the word “memory”, being defined as “memory for the events of one's life” [81, p. 103]. As those authors note, autobiographical memory “constitutes a major crossroads in human cognition where considerations relating to the self, emotion, goals, and personal meanings all intersect” [81, p. 103], and it is the behavioral and neurobiological nature of this intersection that is the focus on the current review.

In this article, we begin by briefly reviewing the qualitative characteristics, functions, and neural underpinnings of autobiographical memory (Section 2). We give particular attention to the constructivist nature of autobiographical memory and describe how recent neuroimaging studies have clarified some of the mechanisms that support this reconstruction process and yield memories of varying levels of specificity. We then turn our attention to the main focus of the review, examining the interactions between emotion and autobiographical memory. We discuss how the emotional content of an experience can influence the way in which the event is retained and recalled (Section 3). We describe how emotional experiences can be remembered with high confidence even when the events are not remembered in a highly consistent fashion, and we discuss the features of an emotional experience that may lead to these influences. We also describe how some aspects of an emotional experience can be remembered more accurately and vividly than others, resulting in a “memory trade-off” or in “tunnel memory” for restricted details of an event. After presenting the behavioral evidence that such effects occur, we describe the neural interactions that give rise to these effects, discussing the way in which emotion can influence the encoding, consolidation, and retrieval of autobiographical memories. We then describe how experienced emotion and activated emotion regulation goals at the time of autobiographical retrieval can influence the way in which past emotions and prior experiences are recalled (Section 4). We discuss how memories of the emotions experienced during a specific event are often reconstructed in light of current emotional states. We review how emotions experienced at the time of retrieval can influence which autobiographical information is most accessible and therefore most likely to be retrieved, such as in mood congruent memory. We also describe how individuals' emotion regulation goals at the time of retrieval can bias which memories are likely to be retrieved, and we discuss how the details of prior events can be construed and even biased based on emotion regulation goals. We describe what has been learned about the neural processes affected by mood states (i.e., depression) and by emotion regulation, exploring how that literature might inform future investigations of the interplay between the emotions experienced at the time of retrieval and the memories recalled. In the final section (Section 5), we propose conclusions that can be drawn about the intersection of emotion and autobiographical memory and suggest ideas for future research in this domain.