Abstract
Although emotional content is known to strengthen memory consolidation, its influence on how the unfolding of events is retained over time has received little attention. Building on the finding that negative events are remembered with less temporal compression and richer detail than neutral events, this study examined whether this emotional advantage changes over time, as would be expected if consolidation contributes to it. Participants viewed a series of negative and neutral videos and, either immediately or after a 24-hour or 72-hour delay, mentally replayed each event and verbally described it. Temporal compression was indexed by the ratio of video duration to replay duration, memory richness by narrative length and linguistic measures of episodic detail, and the preservation of event content by embedding-based similarity to descriptions produced during viewing. At immediate recall, negative events were replayed with less compression and described with more words and episodic detail than neutral events, replicating prior findings. After a delay, the emotional advantage in narrative length and episodic detail increased, and similarity to the video descriptions declined for neutral but not for negative events, whereas evidence for a corresponding increase in the emotion effect on temporal compression was less conclusive. These findings show that the emotional advantage in memory content for naturalistic, dynamic events is not fixed at encoding but increases over time, pointing to a role for consolidation.