NEVER forget: negative emotional valence enhances recapitulation

Abstract

A hallmark feature of episodic memory is that of “mental time travel,” whereby an individual feels they have returned to a prior moment in time. Cognitive and behavioral neuroscience methods have revealed a neurobiological counterpart: Successful retrieval often is associated with reactivation of a prior brain state. We review the emerging literature on memory reactivation and recapitulation, and we describe evidence for the effects of emotion on these processes. Based on this review, we propose a new model: Negative Emotional Valence Enhances Recapitulation (NEVER). This model diverges from existing models of emotional memory in three key ways. First, it underscores the effects of emotion during retrieval. Second, it stresses the importance of sensory processing to emotional memory. Third, it emphasizes how emotional valence—whether an event is negative or positive—affects the way that information is remembered. The model specifically proposes that, as compared to positive events, negative events both trigger increased encoding of sensory detail and also elicit a closer resemblance between the sensory encoding signature and the sensory retrieval signature. The model also proposes that negative valence enhances the reactivation and storage of sensory details over offline periods, leading to a greater divergence between the sensory recapitulation of negative and positive memories over time. Importantly, the model proposes that these valence-based differences occur even when events are equated for arousal, thus rendering an exclusively arousal-based theory of emotional memory insufficient. We conclude by discussing implications of the model and suggesting directions for future research to test the tenets of the model.

Memory-related functional connectivity in visual processing regions varies by prior emotional context

“…Interestingly, although regions of the ventral visual processing stream were engaged for neutral trials, they did not relate to recollective success for those items. These findings are consistent with our prior work [6; 7] and the tenants of our “NEVER” model of emotional memory [15], that sensory processing and reactivation of the sensory regions during retrieval is disproportionately important for negative compared to positive memories, although in these analyses, this pattern was particularly strong when the context was a scene rather than a face.…”

“…Research in the emotion memory literature often focuses on arousal, and collapses across negative and positive valence, but these results indicate that patterns of network activity can differ for negative and positive valence. These data provide more evidence for our “NEVER” model [15] of episodic memory retrieval which goes beyond current models of emotional memory to provide a framework for valence-specific recapitulation effects.…”

“…Second, we were interested in examining functional connectivity at retrieval, again with a particular interest in whether valence patterns would emerge in this connectivity. Although the same alternate hypotheses existed for connectivity—there might be minimal, or no, effects of emotion, or the dominant effect might be related to arousal—based on our findings of greater recapitulation of visual processing regions during retrieval of stimuli previously encoded in a negative context [6; 7] and in line with tenants of our “NEVER” model of emotional memory [15], we predicted that network connectivity correlated with visual processing regions would vary by emotional valence and would be stronger for stimuli encoded in a negative context.…”

Trauma and Long‐Term Memory for Childhood Events: Impact Matters

“…Nonetheless, the findings are important to understand how distress may affect memory. Although not entirely uniform, this work largely suggests that memory is stronger for highly negative emotional events than for neutral or less emotional events (Bowen, Kark, & Kensinger, ), and more recently, that survival relevance (i.e., the need to escape or prevent threats to survival) also aids memory (Nairne & Panderirada, ).…”

The mediational role of distracting stimuli in emotional word recognition

“…This is an effect that has been reported as a robust one on several aspects of cognition, as well as on behavior (Van Tol, Demenescu, Van der Wee, Kortekaas, Marjan, et al 2012). Several studies claimed that emotional words might capture more attention than neutral ones (Bowen, Kark, & Kensinger 2017;Sereno, Scott, Yao, Thaden, & O'Donnell 2015). More precisely, and focusing on the particular effect of negative emotional content on word recognition, it has been suggested that negative stimuli elicit slower latencies under this condition.…”