CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Emotional processing and episodic memory are closelyrelated throughout childhood development. With respect to emotional episodicmemory, available evidence shows that the consolidation of information isaccompanied by an arousal that generates longer duration and persistence of thememory representations. In the case of early stages of development (i.e., first5 years), it is less clear how these associations emerge and are modulated byindividual and environmental factors. In this study, 116 4- to 5-years oldArgentinean children from different socio-environmental contexts (i.e., favorableor unfavorable living conditions at home), performed a task of visual emotionalmemory in which they observed a set of 15 images with variable emotional valences(negative, neutral, and positive). The child?s task was to appraise each imageusing one of the following three possible valences: (a) drawings of faces withsmiles (positive valence), (b) drawings of faces with tears and round mouthwith edges down (negative valence), or (c) drawings of faces with horizontalmouth (neutral valence). Five years-old children exhibited greateraccuracy appraisal. Individual differences in emotional accuracy appraisalallowed us to observe different performances in free recall of negative visualimages. Accuracy appraisal did not vary between children withrespect to gender, living conditions at home, or language ability. Seven to ten days after the emotional appraisal children were asked to tell theexperimenter all the images they remembered (variables of interest: free recallof negative, positive, or neutral images). Results showed individual (age)differences. Specifically, 5-years-old children evoked more images than 4-years-oldchildren. Thesefindings contribute to the understanding of emotional memory in earlydevelopmental stages and raise the need to include emotional appraisal in theassessment of episodic memory.

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