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Dynamics of Emotional States and Event Boundary Perception during Naturalistic Video Viewing

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Hsin-Hui Tsao¹ (), Nora Wolf¹, Ethan Cashatt¹, Shreya Kumar¹, Arvind Karthik Senthilkumar¹, Charan Ranganath¹; ¹University of California, Davis

A great deal of research has demonstrated that emotional arousal modulates memory for static words, images, or slide shows. With more naturalistic stimuli such as movies, people tend to segment continuous experience into discrete events, and the boundaries between events can powerfully influence memory. Little is known about how emotional arousal and valence changes interact with event segmentation (Chen & Swallow, 2025), and how these interactions affect memory performance. Here, we used the “emotional compass” task developed by McClay et al. (2023) to investigate the relationship between fluctuations in emotional states, event segmentation, memory, and brain activity evoked during viewing of an episode of the TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm. One participant group used the emotional compass to report continuous emotional valence and arousal changes, whereas another group completed an event segmentation task during the same episode to indicate the time points at which they perceived event boundaries. Measures of emotional fluctuation and change speed were calculated, as well as event segmentation density and agreement across the time course. Preliminary analyses revealed significant correlations between perceived event boundaries and emotional fluctuations and demonstrated that emotional valence changed more markedly and rapidly around event boundaries. These findings highlight the dynamic interaction between emotion and event segmentation in a naturalistic context, and forthcoming analyses incorporating behavioral and neuroimaging data will further elucidate this complex relationship.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic