The planned study investigates how discrete negative emotions, specifically fear and anger, modulate temporal source memory across different retention intervals. While previous research has demonstrated that emotional arousal and valence influence item recognition and memory for perceptual contexts or sources, the interaction between emotion and the temporal organization of episodic memory remains underexplored. Fear and anger, although both threat-related, negatively valenced, and high in arousal, differ in their attentional orientations: fear tends to broaden attention toward contextual cues, whereas anger orients attention toward the source of threat. This divergence may differentially influence how emotional events are temporally bound and later retrieved.

In the experiment, participants will view two sequential face lists composed of fearful, angry, and neutral facial expressions presented in randomized order. Retention interval will be manipulated between subjects as immediate and 24-hour delayed test. Following encoding, participants will complete a recognition recognition test for the faces and temporal source attribution test for their list membership. We are seeking input on an affective rating tool to ensure and assess active appraisal of the emotional stimuli. Memory data will be modeled using the two-high-threshold multinomial processing tree (2HTM) model (Bayen et al., 1996) to disentangle item recognition, source memory, and guessing behavior. This approach enables a fine-grained understanding of how discrete emotions shape temporal binding across different memory delays, making an important contribution to emotion and cognition research.