Negative Emotion Places a Boundary on Memory Malleability

Autobiographical memories, the memories we have of our personal past, change over time ascontent is forgotten or added to the original memory trace. While decades of research hasdemonstrated the augmenting effect emotion can have on memory, even memories for verynegative experiences seem to be susceptible to change. However, it is unclear whether or notnegative emotion in day-to-day life might protect everyday memories from distortion. Here, weexamined whether the consistency with which everyday experiences are recalled differs as afunction of emotion. Participants (N=513) recalled negative and neutral events from their past attwo time points, eight weeks apart. Using human scoring and large language modelingapproaches to quantify the consistency of narrative recalls, we found that, although both negativeand neutral memories showed moderate consistency between recalls, memories for negativeevents were more consistent than memories for neutral events. While our emotional memoriesare not perfect records of the past, this work suggests that emotion reduces a memory’svulnerability to changing over time.