Reconciling Opposing Effects of Emotion on Relational Memory: Behavioral, Eye-Tracking, and Brain Imaging Investigations

The effects of emotion on memory are wide-ranging and powerful, but they are not uniform. Although there is agreement that emotion enhances memory for individual items, how it influences memory for the associated contextual details (relational memory, RM) remains debated. The prevalent view suggests that emotion impairs RM, but there is also evidence that emotion enhances RM. To reconcile these diverging results, we carried out three studies incorporating the following features: (1) testing RM with increased specificity, distinguishing between subjective (recollection based) and objective (item-context match) RM accuracy, (2) accounting for emotion-attention interactions via eye-tracking and task manipulation, and (3) using stimuli with integrated item-context content. Challenging the prevalent view, we identified both enhancing and impairing effects. First, emotion enhanced subjective RM, separately and when confirmed by accurate objective RM. Second, emotion impaired objective RM through attention capturing, but it enhanced RM accuracy when attentional effects were statistically accounted for using eye-tracking data. Third, emotion also enhanced RM when participants were cued to focus on contextual details during encoding, likely by increasing item-context binding. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging data recorded from a subset of participants showed that emotional enhancement of RM was associated with increased activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, along with increased intra-MTL and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex-MTL functional connectivity. Overall, these findings reconcile evidence regarding opposing effects of emotion on RM and point to possible training interventions to increase RM specificity in healthy functioning, posttraumatic stress disorder, and aging, by promoting item-context binding and diminishing memory decontextualization. Public Significance Statement This research demonstrates the importance of a novel way of conceptualizing and measuring associative memory and of accounting for effects of attention in emotion-memory interactions. Our findings challenge the status quo view that emotion impairs relational memory and clarify the conditions in which emotion enhances memory for contextual details associated with distressing stimuli. These results provide strong premises for game-changing approaches in the quest for identifying ways to improve learning and well-being when facing stressor