Emotional memory persists longer than event memory

Abstract

The interaction between amygdala-driven and hippocampus-driven activities is expected to explain why emotion enhances episodic memory recognition. However, overwhelming behavioral evidence regarding the emotion-induced enhancement of immediate and delayed episodic memory recognition has not been obtained in humans. We found that the recognition performance for event memory differs from that for emotional memory. Although event recognition deteriorated equally for episodes that were or were not emotionally salient, emotional recognition remained high for only stimuli related to emotional episodes. Recognition performance pertaining to delayed emotional memory is an accurate predictor of the context of past episodes.