Episodic Memory Through a Social and Emotional Lens

Negative emotion enhances item memory but may reduce associative memory. Social information may also enhance memory, yet how social and emotional cues combine to affect memory for focal and surrounding details is unknown. Gender differences may also exist, but whether women and men encode and remember negative and social information differently is unclear. This study examines how social information contributes to or interacts with emotion to influence item and associative memory, and whether gender plays a role in how social and/or emotional information is recognized. Discovery and replication samples (N = 706) were recruited. Stimuli included (1) images with varying social and emotional content categorized into four conditions: negative social, negative nonsocial, neutral social, neutral nonsocial and (2) neutral images of objects paired with target stimuli to assess associative memory. Participants viewed the image pairings (Encoding). Twenty-four hours later, item and associative recognition memory were tested. Item recognition memory was better for negative vs. neutral and social vs. nonsocial images. By contrast, associative recognition memory was worse for negative vs. neutral, but better for social vs. nonsocial images. Finally, women demonstrated similar item memory performance compared to men but better associative recognition memory performance overall compared to men. Emotional and social cues impart distinct effects on how we form holistic episodic memories, highlighting the importance of considering these critical factors when striving to understand how and what we remember.