Distorted temporal position memory under negative emotional states

Our episodic memories often integrate emotional experiences and exhibit distorted temporal accuracy, prompting the question of how emotion influences the encoding and retrieval of temporal information. Across two experiments, we used a fine-grained timeline estimation task to test how negative emotion and its spillover influence absolute temporal position memory while minimising primacy/recency and response-interference confounds. In Experiment 1, negative pictures were remembered as occurring earlier than they did relative to neutral pictures (earlier-shift bias), despite preserved mapping between estimated and actual positions in both conditions. In Experiment 2, viewing negative videos prior to neutral pictures produced a comparable earlier-shift for those neutral items, indicating affective spillover. Physiological indices were consistent with carryover of arousal from induction into encoding (elevated skin conductance; cardiac deceleration). Mixed-effects modeling favored condition-level (state) predictors over item-level valence, indicating a state-based modulation of temporal placement. The pattern aligns with encoding-centred accounts in which arousal-biased competition prioritises goal-relevant sequence structure and with temporal-context frameworks positing emotion-induced context shifts/boundaries; reconstructive retrieval likely compounds the absolute-position bias. We conclude that negative emotion does not uniformly degrade temporal memory but can systematically bias absolute placement while leaving ordinal mapping largely intact.