Influence of Naturalistic, Emotional Context and Intolerance of Uncertainty on Arousal-Mediated Biases in Episodic Memory

Threat-related arousal is known to distort memory, biasing individuals towards perceptual details and away from contextual details. This work has mainly been conducted in laboratory settings, limiting the application of findings to real-world experiences. To test how threat-related arousal influences multi-featural memory for complex events, participants navigated an immersive haunted house while physiological arousal data was collected and later, recalled memories for the event after a 1-week delay. We found that threat-related arousal resulted in relatively fewer remembered events, but enhanced recall of perceptual details for events that were remembered. Further, the relationship between physiological arousal and perceptual bias was impaired in individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty, suggesting that uncertainty aversion may result in a generalization of threat-related perceptual biases to mundane events. These findings support a model by which heart rate and individual differences in uncertainty aversion interact to shape how threatening events are recorded in long-term memory.