Negative Emotion Enhances Memory for the Sequential Unfolding of a Naturalistic Experience

The events of our lives unfold over time. When remembering these events, we often reference information about when they occurred and their sequential unfolding. How does negative emotion affect our ability to reconstruct the elements of an event in the correct temporal order? This study explored this question using naturalistic film stimuli. Human participants (N = 276) saw video clips varying in emotion (high vs. low). Later, participants were asked to reconstruct the events in the encoded order. Participants' temporal-order memory was better in the high- versus low-emotion condition. Free-recall data showed that participants remembered the high-emotion video with greater vividness, though consistency of details did not differ, nor did spontaneous ordering of clips. Our findings shed light on the multifaceted effects of negative emotion on memory, suggesting that highly negative events are reconstructed with greater temporal fidelity when order is a task demand. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.