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Computational Sentiment in Narratives: Links Between Depressive Symptoms and Film-Based Episodic Memory

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

Daisy Kiyemba¹, Johanna Matulonis^1,2, Alex Adornato¹, Mariah Lewis¹, Jacob Hooker², Anne Berry^1,2; ¹Brandeis University, ²2Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA.

Depressive symptoms are associated with poorer episodic memory in aging, yet emotional content can enhance memory performance. Here, we used naturalistic movie stimuli to test the impact of emotional sentiment on the relationship between depressive symptoms and memory in cognitively normal, non-depressed older adults. Methods: Sixty-nine participants watched three short films and freely recalled everything they could remember from each film following a 1hr delay. Transcribed audio-recordings were scored for memory (total verifiable details) and sentiment (positive, neutral, and negative). Sentiment was quantified using natural language processing analysis (open-source transformer-based deep learning model optimized for sentiment classification; CardiffNLP’s twitter-roberta-base-sentiment latest model; Loureiro et al., 2022). We measured depression symptoms using the Geriatric Depression Scale. Results: Higher levels of depressive symptoms were associated with poorer film memory recall (r = -.24, p = .049). We observed moderating effects of sentimentality for both positive and negative content relative to neutral. Specifically, the negative effect of higher depressive symptoms on memory was diminished in individuals who expressed higher levels of positive (t (61) = 3.33, p = .002) and negative sentiment (t (61) = 2.32, p = .024). Individuals with greater positive versus negative sentimentality showed better memory performance overall (r = .31, p = .010), though positive biases were not directly related to depressive symptoms. These findings suggest emotionally contextualized information may help buffer the detrimental effect of depressive symptoms on episodic memory. This study highlights movie stimuli as a useful tool for examining links among emotion, depressive symptoms, and memory.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic