The Emotion Filmmaker: Temporal Memory, Time-Emotion Integration, and Affective Style

Abstract

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.

Emotional state dynamics impacts temporal memory

“…Consistent with these empirical findings and computational models, we found a positive association between the extent of the subjective dilation of time in memory following Neutral-to-Negative transitions and trait dispositional negativity, a known risk factor for mood and anxiety disorders (Shackman et al, 2016). In the future, it will be important to determine whether this finding may be due to increased attentional biases toward negative information (also known to be altered in mood and anxiety disorders (Bourke et al, 2010; Hamilton et al, 2012; Mennen et al, 2019; Mogg et al, 1995; Norris, 2021)—or, alternatively, whether it may stem specifically from less robust temporal context encoding or maintenance in at-risk individuals, which could precede the onset of negative events (Li & Lapate, 2023; J. Wang et al, 2022).…”

“…First, the emotional manipulation and emotional-event transitions in the current study included only negative and neutral events. Understanding how positive emotions interact with temporal memory during dynamic emotional state transitions is a burgeoning area of research (Clewett & Davachi, 2021; Li & Lapate, 2023; McClay et al, 2023) that is essential for a full understanding of emotion-temporal memory interactions, as it permits isolating negative-valence specific from emotional arousal effects. Relatedly, in contrast to our a-priori hypothesis, we did not find that temporal distance judgments of Negative-to-Neutral transitions was compressed.…”