Physiological and Emotional Arousal Guide Metacognitive Reporting and Recall of Naturalistic Experiences

Abstract

As individuals navigate the world, they are bound to have emotionally intense experiences. These events not only influence momentary physiological and affective responses, but also have a powerful impact on emotional recall. In this research, we used an ecologically-valid context of a haunted house to examine the association between physiological arousal and metacognitive memory of emotional experience. Participants navigated a haunted house while heart rate and explicit fear ratings were recorded, and then recalled specific events from the haunted house and the intensity of these emotional events one week later. We found that heart rate predicted both reports of negative affective intensity in the moment and during later recall of the haunted house events. However, we found that recalled emotional intensity was influenced by both affective categorization and physiological arousal, such that individuals who labelled a recalled event as fear-eliciting reported more fear upon recall than they indicated experiencing at the time (and vice-versa for events labelled as not fear-eliciting). This work suggests that our physiological and emotional experiences may meaningfully interact to inform metacognitive recall of salient experiences.