Abstract/Summary

Emotional events are usually remembered better than neutral events. For example, people usually remember instances of own success or failure better than mundane events. Despite the abundant literature on the interaction between emotion and memory, there are still some unanswered questions with regards to the effects of emotion on memory and moderators of emotional memory. One of these questions concerns whether and how emotion affects memory for neutral information encountered later. The second question concerns the sources of individual differences in emotional memory. There are individual differences in emotional memory; such that some individuals may be predisposed to remember negative information more than positive or vice versa. Such differences in emotional memory may be rooted in individual differences in the bodily responses (interoception) as well as brain’s functional organisation. In the present thesis, each of these questions was addressed across three studies. The first study examined how experiencing emotional arousal affects memory of neutral information encountered minutes later; and whether the goal-relevance of the information modulates the effects of emotional arousal. Using a public speech task combined with false heart rate feedback, the study found that emotional arousal does not affect memory of neutral items viewed minutes later, irrespective of their goal-relevance. The second study examined the effects of interoception on emotional memory by presenting heartbeat biofeedback while presenting emotional images. The study revealed that attending to heartbeat biofeedback leads to increased negativity bias in memory, suggesting that interoception may play key roles in individual differences in memory for emotional items concurrently presented. The third study investigated the association between resting-state functional connectivity and emotional memory in a large dataset, utilising machine learning algorithms. Yet resting-state functional connectivity was not associated with individual differences in emotional memory. In sum, the studies reported in the thesis cast doubts on some of the previous literature’s claims that a) emotional arousal affects memory for other information individuals encounter subsequently and b) resting-state connectivity is useful to predict individual differences in emotional memory or cognitive processing in general. The findings also showed the effect of attention to heartbeats on emotional memory, suggesting that interoception may be associated with individual differences in emotional memory. The research has practical implications and theoretical implications leading to better understanding of the effects and moderators of emotional memory.