Negative emotion reduces autobiographical memory's susceptibility to change.

Abstract

Autobiographical memories, the memories we have of our personal past, change over time as content is forgotten or added to the original memory trace. While decades of research has demonstrated the augmenting effect emotion can have on memory, even memories for very negative experiences seem to be susceptible to change. However, it is unclear whether or not negative emotion in day-to-day life might protect everyday memories from distortion. Here, we examined whether the consistency with which everyday experiences are recalled differs as a function of the emotionality of the event. Participants (N = 513) recalled negative and neutral events from their past at two time points, 8 weeks apart. Using human scoring and large language modeling approaches to quantify the consistency of narrative recalls, we found that, although both negative and neutral memories showed moderate consistency between recalls, memories for negative events were more consistent than memories for neutral events. While emotional memories are not perfect records of the past, this work suggests that emotion reduces a memory's vulnerability to changing over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).