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Emotions in motion: The influence of emotions on memory for videos

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Priscilla Castillo-Madrigal¹, Lily Yoder¹, Regan Christian¹, Carmen E Westerberg¹; ¹Texas State University

Previous research indicates that emotional items are better remembered than neutral items. Furthermore, for negative stimuli, central details are better remembered at the cost of memory for peripheral details. However, emotional memory research has primarily relied on static affective stimuli such as pictures, which may have limited ecological validity, as real-world emotional experiences are multisensory and dynamic. The present study examined whether emotional valence influences content and contextual memory for video stimuli that are visually complex, narrative-based, and include audio. Young adult participants (N = 55) completed three experimental blocks in which they viewed four emotionally valenced news videos (two positive, two negative) and two neutral videos, presented in one of six locations on a screen. Videos were from a publicly available dataset previously rated for arousal and valence and were relatively brief (average length = 45 s). After each block, participants completed spatial memory and free recall tests for each of the six videos. Preliminary analyses indicate that fewer details were remembered from negative videos compared with neutral and positive videos and that memory for spatial context was less accurate for negative videos than for positive and neutral videos. Additional analyses will examine whether the type of details recalled differs across negative, neutral, and positive videos to determine whether worse detail recall from negative videos is driven by increased focus on central themes at the expense of peripheral details. These results will provide important new insights regarding how emotions influence memory for dynamic situations unfolding across time.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic