Emotional experiences are temporally dynamic, but retrospective emotion judgments suggest temporal neglect in remembered emotion. Instead, retrospective emotion evaluations are often biased by discrete salient moments, as revealed by duration neglect and peak-end effects. However, how these biases originate, and their significance for emotional functioning, remain unclear. Here, we test the hypothesis that retrospective emotion biases emerge due to fundamental limits of temporal memory capacity. Participants (n = 60) underwent a novel paradigm comprising affectively-rich movie sequences while providing emotion ratings continuously (moment-by-moment) and retrospectively. Temporal memory for previously-watched emotional-movie sequences and dispositional negativity were measured. We found that the ‘end’ bias increased with the duration of emotional-movie sequences, suggesting limited temporal-processing capacity. Critically, temporal-memory errors were associated with retrospective emotion biases and dispositional negativity. These results indicate that retrospective emotion biases may stem partly from mnemonic temporal errors that are emotionally maladaptive.
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