What happened first? Working memory and negative emotion tell you better: evidence from a temporal binding task

Emotionally arousing events may disrupt the ability to bind together different features of items to their context; this holds true both for spatial binding (i.e. remembering the locations of previously presented items) and temporal binding (i.e. remembering the order in which different items were previously presented). Nonetheless, memory for emotional events may be enhanced in certain situations. A key factor that might explain the memory-emotion relation is represented by individual differences in cognition. The present study investigated temporal binding for neutral and negative events in a group of 50 undergraduate students, focusing on the role of individual differences in working memory (measured through forward and backward digit span tasks). Temporal binding was assessed with sorting accuracy of various pictorial scripted events, 24h after encoding. Results showed that higher backward digit span predicted higher binding accuracy; importantly, this was qualified by the interaction with valence, such that higher backward digit span predicted better performance for negative, but not neutral, events. It is concluded that working memory facilitates binding of emotional events to their temporal context during encoding, creating a strong representation, and favouring later retrieval of such bound representations.