Reliving emotional memories: Episodic recollection elicits affective psychophysiological responses

Abstract

Episodic recollection allows people to vividly re-experience past events. The remembered information can then inform and guide behavior in the present, especially in the case of emotional events. One way to fulfill this adaptive memory function might be through psychophysiological responses that signal desirable and undesirable outcomes and thereby motivate behavior. However, it remains unknown whether the recollection of past emotional experiences can indeed re-elicit corresponding affective psychophysiological responses. We addressed this question in two experiments (N1 = 48, N2 = 41). Young adults watched positive, negative, and neutral movie clips. One day later, they were instructed to remember these episodes. To index the psychophysiological expression of positive and negative affect, we measured smiling (zygomaticus major) and frowning (corrugator supercilii) responses, respectively. Results revealed that participants smiled more when remembering positive compared to neutral and negative memories. Moreover, they frowned more when remembering negative compared to positive but not neutral memories. Interestingly, the intensity of smiling or frowning during remembering was not related to the intensity during the original experience. Our results suggest that affective psychophysiological responses might play a crucial role in the adaptive function of episodic memories. Therefore, future studies on emotional episodic memory could benefit from incorporating psychophysiological indices.

‘Episodic Conditioning’: a novel approach to study the intersection of Pavlovian threat conditioning and episodic memory.

“…The zygomaticus major contracts when people smile and quantifies positive valence, whereas the corrugator supercilii contracts when people frown and quantifies negative valence. Importantly, fEMG response magnitudes correspond to larger expressed affect (Brown & Schwartz, 1980;Golland et al, 2018), and differentiate between neutral and emotional events both during encoding (Lang et al, 1993) and when they are subsequently retrieved from memory (Duken et al, 2021). We hypothesized that both negative and positive stimuli would induce heightened arousal, resulting in increased pupil dilation relative to neutral stimuli.…”

Modification of episodic memory valence through retrieval-update mechanisms requires a narrative link between events

“…Also, previous studies using reconsolidation manipulations have found discrepancies between different read-outs of emotional memory (Soeter & Kindt, 2010. However, in a recent study from our lab using a variation of the MOVIE paradigm described in Experiment 2 we found that selfreported valence largely converged with a specific physiological measure of valence, that is, facial electromyography (Duken et al, 2023). This shows that affective updating can be captured with more automatic measures of emotional memories, and suggests that the subjective measures of memory valence do not (only) reflect demand bias.…”

Can neutral episodic memories become emotional? Evidence from facial expressions and subjective feelings

“…Memory trials in the control conditions (positive, negative, neutral) were not followed by an updating movie clip. Data from these control trials also allowed to replicate previous findings from our lab and were presented as part of an earlier manuscript (Duken et al, 2022). Like on Day 1, participants had a maximum of 5 s to confirm each rating (both when rating their responses to memories and when rating their responses to new clips).…”

“…The study design and analyses were preregistered on OSF (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/DARYV). Data from control conditions concerning memories that were not updated with new emotional clips on Day 2 were also used in an earlier manuscript on the reliving of emotional episodic memories (Duken, Neumayer, Kindt, Oosterwijk, & van Ast, 2022).…”

“…The Day 2 but not the Day 3 data from these manipulation checks were also analyzed in a manuscript on the reliving of emotional episodic memories (Duken et al, 2022).…”