Fictional narratives can follow identifiable emotional trajectories, reflecting changes in positive and negative emotion at specific points in the story. People can use these stories—as well as stories from their own personal experiences—to make sense of themselves and the world around them. These personal memory narratives, too, can demonstrate changes in positive and negative emotion, reflecting how events transpired and people’s feelings about them. Could the emotion in people’s memory narratives mirror the trajectories seen in fiction? We trained 600 participants to recognise emotional trajectories in fictional stories, then asked them to classify whether or not memory narratives conformed to one of those trajectories. We found people can identify emotional trajectories in others’ memory narratives. Our findings improve our understanding for how people structure their personal memory narratives, and suggest a means by which future research could determine the extent to which these trajectories serve functions.

This research aimed to examine the context-change account (Sahakyan & Kelley, 2002) to explain directed forgetting (DF) using the item-method. Two experiments were conducted, with emotional and neutral faces as items and emotional and neutral sounds as contexts. The experiments differed in the timing of contexts: In Experiment 1 the contexts were presented simultaneously with the faces, whereas in Experiment 2, the contexts followed the 'remember'/'forget' instructions. Each experiment included two conditions: (A) neutral faces in emotional contexts; (B) emotional faces in neutral contexts. A recognition test was conducted, and the sensitivity and response bias were computed for testing with a 2×2 repeated-measures ANOVA. The results showed that the DF effect occurred only when the contexts followed the instructions. Furthermore, happy contexts enhanced the recognition of neutral faces, while response bias was observed exclusively for fearful faces. These findings highlight the role of context in DF, supporting the context-change account.

Autobiographical memory functions have been widely studied in terms of why individuals remember their memories in general and why they remember specific memories. The current study aims to investigate the relationship between general tendencies in the functions and the functions of specific memories, while integrating different assessment techniques and emotional contexts. Three hundred college students were asked to write about three emotional memories: positive, negative, and excited. Then, they answered follow-up questions about the functions of memories and completed the Thinking About Life Experiences Questionnaire (TALE). The memories were coded for self, social, and directive functions. The findings showed that the general use of autobiographical memory functions was related to self-rated specific memory functions but not related to content-coded functions. The relationships were also dependent on the emotional valence. The findings were discussed based on the methodological and conceptual definitions of the functions and the emotional context of the memories.

Individuals typically retrieve information that is congruent with their group identity more than those that are incongruent. In this ongoing study, we aim to illuminate mechanisms underlying such patterns of motivated memory and determine whether external factors, such as incentives, can shift identity-driven recall patterns. Football fans read positive and negative events from their supported team’s history. In a subsequent surprise free recall task, participants are assigned to one of three conditions: monetary incentive for accurate recall, recounting events to a neutral listener (social condition), or recalling events with no incentive or audience (control condition). We compare these conditions to determine whether incentives or social contexts influence the recall of group-identity-congruent versus incongruent information. Additionally, we explore whether group identification strength moderates these effects, hypothesizing that stronger identifiers will show greater bias toward group-enhancing information. Results have implications for reducing biases in memory retrieval and fostering balanced group narratives.