Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Emotional events are subjectively vivid, but whether this vividness reflects superior objective memory remains debated. We distinguish three competing hypotheses: (1) Emotion does not enhance objective recall despite subjective vividness, (2) Emotion selectively enhances central sensory details while impairing peripheral contextual information, or (3) Emotion enhances all memory aspects, with benefits spreading from central to peripheral details. We tested these hypotheses using a naturalistic dataset from three Reddit discussion forums ("subreddits''), where users post remembered details of forgotten movies. Analyzing 1,509 posts from movie identification subreddits, we found that negative emotion strongly predicted which movies were remembered (supporting hypotheses 2 and 3 over hypothesis 1), with horror and thriller movies significantly overrepresented. Scene-level details were recalled more frequently and accurately than movie-level information, suggesting that emotion preferentially affects central, sensory details. However, both scene-level and movie-level details were enhanced by negative emotion without a significant interaction, supporting the third hypothesis that emotion broadly enhances memory while prioritizing central information. These findings suggest that negative emotion enhances both the selectivity and overall strength of long-term episodic memories, with implications for understanding emotional memory in naturalistic contexts.