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Dissociable emotional and social influences on facets of associative memory

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Khushi Sharma¹ (), Chantelle M. Cocquyt¹, Daniela J. Palombo^1,2; ¹University of British Columbia, ²Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health

Emotional experiences in daily life are often social in nature, yet studies of emotional memory typically do not consider social context as a key dimension. Although negative emotion generally impairs associative memory, this impairment can be rescued when stimuli contain social cues. A separate line of work shows that negative emotion “bleeds over” to shape later appraisal of neutral stimuli —an effect contingent on associative memory mechanisms (hereafter, transfer of valence; TOV). Given TOV is contingent upon associative memory and that social stimuli facilitate associative binding to negative stimuli, we predicted a stronger TOV effect when negative stimuli are rich in social cues. To test this, participants encoded social or non-social negative or neutral targets paired with neutral associates. During later appraisal (to assess TOV) and cued recall (to assess associative memory) tasks, participants rated the neutral associates for pleasantness and recalled the original pairings, respectively. As expected, we observed a TOV effect: neutral associates were rated as less pleasant in the negative (versus neutral) condition. Contrary to expectation, the TOV effect was not larger in magnitude when negative pictures were rich in social cues. Moreover, associative memory recall also deviated from our expectations (and our prior work examining associative recognition): There was no effect of emotion, though participants remembered social pairs significantly better than non-social ones. Together, these findings suggest that negative emotion and social relevance have dissociable effects on facets of associative binding. The results underscore the complexity of how people remember emotionally charged and socially rich experiences.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions