Negative Emotion Enhances Memory Accuracy

There have been extensive discussions about whether emotional memories contain more accurate detail than nonemotional memories do, or whether individuals simply believe that they have remembered emotional experiences more accurately. I review evidence that negative emotion enhances not only the subjective vividness of a memory but also the likelihood of remembering some (but not all) event details. I then describe neuroimaging evidence suggesting that engagement of emotion-processing regions (particularly the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex) relates to the encoding and retrieval of details intrinsically linked to negative items.