The impact of different emotional states on the memory for what, where and when features of specific events

•We investigated the impact of emotional states on what, where and when memory.•An anxious emotional state impaired the memory for the location of events in virtual reality.•High levels of negative arousal were associated with poor memory for the temporal and spatial context of events.•High levels o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behavioural brain research 2016-02, Vol.298 (Pt B), p.181-187
Main Authors: Zlomuzica, Armin, Preusser, Friederike, Totzeck, Christina, Dere, Ekrem, Margraf, Jürgen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anxiety
Anxiety disorders
Emotions
Episodic memory
Female
Humans
Item source memory
Male
Memory, Episodic
Psychological Tests
Random Allocation
Spatial Memory
Stressor-related disorders
Time Perception
User-Computer Interface
What-where-when task
Young Adult
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Summary:•We investigated the impact of emotional states on what, where and when memory.•An anxious emotional state impaired the memory for the location of events in virtual reality.•High levels of negative arousal were associated with poor memory for the temporal and spatial context of events.•High levels of happiness were associated with better memory for the spatial context of events. Emotions can modulate the encoding and recollection of personal events. In the present study, we investigated the effects of different emotional states (pleasant, neutral or anxious) on episodic memory formation in a virtual reality (VR) setting. Emotional states were induced by pleasant, neutral or anxiety-inducing movie clips prior to the presentation of specific events in a VR scenario. Episodic memory performance of healthy participants in whom an anxious emotional state had been induced was inferior to those of the neutral and pleasant conditions. In the anxious condition, participants were particularly impaired regarding their memory for the location of events. A correlational analysis indicated that high levels of negative arousal were associated with poor memory for the temporal and spatial context of events. In contrast, high levels of happiness were associated with better memory for the spatial context of events. Our data provide evidence that emotional arousal can modulate memory for what happened, where and when.
ISSN:0166-4328
1872-7549
DOI:10.1016/j.bbr.2015.09.037