The role of encoding processes in the temporal compression of negative events in episodic memory

Episodic memory allows individuals to mentally reconstruct past experiences in a temporally compressed form, such that remembering typically unfolds faster than the original event. This compression is not uniform: recent evidence indicates that negative events are remembered with less temporal compression than neutral ones, suggesting enhanced preservation of event unfolding. The present study investigated the role of encoding processes in this emotional memory advantage. In Experiment 1, we used a divided-attention manipulation to test whether the availability of attentional resources at encoding modulates the effect of emotion on temporal compression. Divided attention reduced overall memory quality—elevating compression rates and reducing detail and dynamism—but did not alter the emotional memory advantage. Experiment 2 examined whether negative emotion influences event segmentation. Results showed that emotion and event segmentation exerted independent effects on temporal compression. Experiment 3 collected online descriptions of unfolding events as a proxy for the amount and type of information attended to during encoding. Results showed that participants attended to comparable amounts of information during negative and neutral events. However, similarity analyses revealed that the correspondence between online descriptions and memory narratives from Experiment 1 decreased for neutral videos encoded under divided attention, whereas it remained stable for negative videos. Together, these findings indicate that negative events produce richer and less compressed memory representations through mechanisms that operate beyond attentional allocation and event segmentation, potentially involving rapid replay or early consolidation processes at event offset.