Interference from Emotional Items Within and Across Events

The kind of information we perceive influences what we remember in many ways. One profound perception is the influence of emotional content on memory for surrounding, nonemotional elements. A large body of evidence shows that affective information consistently causes memory to differ from memory of emotionally neutral information. This research examines retroactive and proactive influences on memory for neutral information during language comprehension in the presence of emotional, distinctive and event boundary information. Findings suggest that an interaction between these two influences causes target information to be remembered better when emotional or distinctive information occurs without an event boundary (within the same event), but not when the emotional or distinctive information occurs across an event boundary, even though there is an overall benefit of the event boundary itself. This finding for emotional and distinctive information suggests that memory for narratives is complex and dependent on the situational factors of the narrative that influence the mental representation.