Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: We are nothing without emotion. In each moment, our feelings are in flux, compelling usforward. Despite ample research on how emotion affects what we remember, however, little is known about how this emotional flux sculpts the structure of our memories. Chapters 1 and 2 present episodic memory theories that suggest emotional valence and arousal act as an internal contextual cues that influence how we separate or bind our experiences in memory. Ongoing research suggests that while positive emotional contexts tend to promote the temporal structure of memory, negative emotional events can either promote or disrupt memory structure depending on experimental and environmental factors. The ensuing Chapters test various conditions under which emotion helps or hurts the temporal organization of memory as well as the cognitive and clinical implications of emotion dynamics’ influence over memory structure. Chapter 3 presents an empirical study testing how emotional change affects event segmentation, or the ability to chunk continuous experiences into discrete episodes. We use custom-composed music to shift around emotional encoding contexts and measure emotion iv dynamics through a novel affect tracking tool called the Emotion Compass. Results show that emotional change relates to memory segmentation as well as recognition and temporal memory accuracy. In contrast, Chapter 4 reports a study showing that punctate negative events bidirectionally disrupt temporal memory. Specifically, temporal memory is worse for information semantically related to and preceding a negative event, and non-selectively worse for any information coming across a negative event. Chapters 5 and 6 examine how these mechanisms vary across individuals. Using a mobile phone version of the Emotion Compass, NLP-based memory analyses, and hidden Markov models, these chapters demonstrate a potential link between adaptive emotion dynamics and more semantically coherent and segmented memories, suggesting that affective structure plays a central role in cognitive health. The results show that coherent memories relate to more normative emotional trajectories and that participants with higher intrusive thinking symptoms exhibit more frenetic emotional trajectories. Finally, Chapter 7 reports preliminary findings that event segmentation may be an opportunity to integrate information into continuously unfolding narrative representations. Taken together, this dissertation argues that emotional flux is a fundamental force in shaping the temporal architecture of memory. By weaving subjective experience into coherent or fragmented forms, emotional flux helps determine how we form stable memories that lay a foundation for more complex personally relevant narrative structures. The breakdown of this process presents a potential clinical target for trauma-related disorders as well as the question of how to follow the threads of a fragmented past.
Author: McClay, Mason
Institution: Banff Centre
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W6998601874