Affective Memory

Abstract Only a fraction of the events that humans experience will be remembered, and even when the occurrence of an event is remembered, only a portion of its details will be retrieved. This selectivity is a hallmark feature of episodic memory. Events that elicit an affective response tend to be prioritized in memory, although there is often an unevenness to those memories, with some details remembered well and others forgotten. This chapter examines the many ways in which an affective response can modulate memory. The chapter is organized around processes that act as an event is initially experienced and encoded, updated or prioritized by new learning, and retrieved. For each of these processes, the chapter integrates knowledge learned from laboratory assessments of behavior with that acquired through investigations of neural mechanisms.