This symposium brings together different disciplines (psychology, sociology, history, visual art) that examine how emotion can interact with memory. The first talk (Olivier Luminet) will show how variations in intensity (arousal) increase memory capacities, and how variations in valence (pleasant vs. unpleasant feelings) can create memory biases. It will also address these dynamics across individual and collective memory. The second talk (Nicole Heller) addresses how the language for narrating traumatic situations evolve with time through the use of quantitative and qualitative approaches. In the third talk, Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek shows how specific events such as wars can transform collective memories into a more converging narrative regarding a country's past, present, and future, due to a more unified range of collective emotions. Finally, Marie Theresa Crick will illustrate how artistic practice can provide reparative memories for events holding heavy emotional legacies. These approaches highlight the role of situated and embodied engagement in events in which shame is inherited and transmitted across generations. The discussion (chaired by Johanna Vollmeyer) will address topics such as the dynamic between individual and collective memories, showing how some collective events (dictatorship, war) can shape individual memories; the particularities of neglected groups (disappeared woman in Argentina Catholic mothers in Ireland, Ukrainian diaspora communities); or the tension between valence centered approach (pleasant vs. unpleasant affect) and discrete approaches (emphasizing the specific role of shame, grief, anger, fear, or pride). A specific attention will also be dedicated to the complementary methodological approaches.
Olivier Luminet, University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium
Psychological perspectives on the impact of emotion on memory.
Psychological approaches have emphasized important findings regarding the impact of emotion on memory. A first effect shows that encoding, consolidation, and retrieval are enhanced when the information at encoding is emotional as opposed to neutral. Variations in the valence of events also lead to contrasted pattern with unpleasant events leading to more consistent memories, whereas memories of pleasant events are more spontaneously available. After experiencing an emotion, people develop regulation strategies to change the nature and the intensity of the emotions they initially felt. The aim is to decrease the overall intensity and to maximize the feeling of pleasantness. These regulatory processes impact our memory. For instance, the Fading Affect Bias highlights that personal negative memories are progressively experienced with less intensity than positive memories, contributing to their lower accessibility over time. More attention is now dedicated to examining whether these differences observed for individual events also occur for collective ones. Contrary to the Positivity Bias observed for personal events, studies show a Negativity Bias when public events are involved, with negative ones being better recalled than positive ones. However, this difference could be limited to the Western context. We also address the effects of emotion on memory when extreme emotional intensity is involved (trauma) and the role of some personality traits that can durably influence the way people who have difficulties in emotion regulation retrieve emotional memories. Finally, the specific case of flashbulb memories, which are detailed memories of the reception context where one learns about a surprising and consequential event illustrate how emotional responses can affect retrieval in the context of public events. Current findings highlight that reconstruction processes only occur during the first years,
Marie Theresa Crick, University of London. From the Relation of Two to Communal Air: Embodied Maternal Memory and Resistance. This paper examines how embodied methodologies in memory studies translate responsibly into reparative actions and ethical narratives, reflecting the potential to collectively stay with affects of what Ahmed calls “histories that hurt.” Grounded in feminist philosophy, affect theory, and socially engaged artistic practice, this inquiry addresses transgenerational trauma as lived experience, rooted in Irish Catholic maternal shame and migration. This practice-based research develops a re-reading of Irigaray’s concept of “shared air,” extending elemental philosophy into a situated, embodied methodology to reimagine the maternal relation as transformative. It begins with the maternal dyad, Irigaray’s “relation of two,” a dynamic space where the mother and daughter preserve singularity through difference. This dyad opens toward the collective sharing of air as a methodology for co-witnessing difficult affects. “Shared air” is an ethical call to cultivate autonomous breath that develops non-narcissistic self-knowing before reaching toward the alterity of the other. This ethical ground is navigated by empathy-in-difference (Stein, Irigaray), facilitating a shift away from individual blame toward collective accountability. Central to this approach is embodied hesitation (Al-Saji), defining breath as a cultivated pause that disrupts automatised rhythms of transgenerational shame and violent colonial legacies. The core argument asserts that socially engaged artistic practice is crucial for creating reparative memory publics from these difficult affective legacies. This methodology is enacted through ‘performance’, filmic breath and embodied workshops that actively open maternal histories into collective holding and somatic engagement. “Shared air” in dialogue with embodied hesitation and the expansion from the relation of two to communal air, models social resilience, pluralism, and participation by staying with inherited shame and silence to create an ethics of relation and collective resistance.
20260731T173020260731T1900America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires11.13. Emotion and memory: looking at their interactions through different perspectivesSV305MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
Affective Transformations of Memory and Identity: Ukrainian Diaspora Responses to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
Individual paperTrauma, Affect, and Emotion00:00 Midnight - 00:00 Midnight (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires) 2026/07/31 03:00:00 UTC - 2026/07/31 03:00:00 UTC
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused a profound affective and mnemonic rupture within Ukrainian diaspora communities. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted during two years of fieldwork in Poland, Israel, and the United States between 2023 and 2025, this paper argues that these experiences have reshaped how Ukrainians in the diaspora remember and emotionally relate to their homeland. Affective responses to the war—ranging from grief, anger, and fear to pride and renewed belonging—have been central to these transformations, influencing both personal and collective modes of remembering. The previously diverging memoryscapes of Ukraine, reflecting diverse temporal and spatial trajectories and divergent political orientations within the Ukrainian diaspora, are now converging around a more unified, affectively charged understanding of the country’s past, present, and future. These processes contribute to the emergence of a shared Ukrainocentric orientation across diaspora communities. This reconfiguration entails a concerted effort to rethink Ukraine’s history—both the three decades of independence and its longer, often fraught, historical relationship with Russia. The Ukrainocentric framing also involves a deliberate distancing from Russian cultural influence, accompanied by a renewed confidence in expressing perspectives from a distinctly Ukrainian standpoint and in upholding Ukrainian language, culture, and traditions. For some in the diaspora, this marks a profound emotional and identity transformation in how they view Russia, Ukraine, and themselves; for others, it reinforces pre-existing mnemonic frameworks shaped by personal or inherited experiences.
Two periods, one memory: changes and continuities in the stories of female survivors of the last Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983).
Individual paperTrauma, Affect, and Emotion00:00 Midnight - 00:00 Midnight (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires) 2026/07/31 03:00:00 UTC - 2026/07/31 03:00:00 UTC
The present investigation seeks to analyze and compare the language of ten testimonies given by five former disappeared women during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), registered in two different periods of time: during the 1980s, within the framework of the National Commission on the Disappearance of People (CONADEP), and during the first decade of the 21st century, by the Oral Archive of Memoria Abierta. The central research question guiding this study is: did the passage of time affect the way in which these female survivors narrated their experiences in clandestine detention centers? To address this question, both sets of testimonies will be analyzed through two digital tools: ML Senti-Con and Voyant Tools. These programmes will allow the development of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, oriented towards the identification of continuities and variations within the testimonies of both periods. The first program will classify the statements in a table according to their emotional polarity (positive, neutral or negative). This table will assign three different percentages (one to each polarity) indicating which one prevails the most. The second program will allow the identification of changes or recurrences in language –through the use of certain words– in a graphical way. In this matter, both tools will be used complementary to observe emotional tendencies and semantic patterns that may reveal changes in how these women narrated their past. It is expected that, evidently, the passing of time did in fact change the way in which these female survivors communicated their experiences in clandestine detention centers. This is due to the development and strengthening of policies regarding memory, truth and justice during the 21st century, which ultimately led to the establishment of “safe spaces” –such as Memoria Abierta– where female survivors were able to narrate their experiences without shame or pressure.
