The role of encoding processes in the temporal compression of negative events in episodic memory

Episodic memory represents past experiences in a temporally compressed form—remembering an event typically takes less time than its actual duration. This compression is not uniform, however: recent work has shown that negative events are remembered with less temporal compression than neutral ones. In the present study, we conducted two experiments to investigate encoding processes that may contribute to this effect. In Experiment 1, we used a divided-attention manipulation to test whether attentional resources during encoding modulate the effect of emotion on temporal compression. Although divided attention produced a general decline in memory quality—elevating compression rates and reducing memory detail and dynamism—the magnitude of the emotional memory advantage remained unchanged under divided versus full attention. This suggests that attentional allocation alone does not explain emotion-related reductions in temporal compression. Experiment 2 examined whether negative emotion influences the segmentation of unfolding events. Results indicated that emotion and event segmentation exerted independent effects on temporal compression. Together, these results suggest that negative events yield richer and less compressed memory traces through encoding mechanisms that operate beyond attentional allocation and event segmentation, potentially involving the rapid replay of just-experienced content at event offset.