ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the theory and data that describe how children and adults understand, evaluate, and subsequently remember real-life events that result in emotional reactions. It discusses the explanatory framework that describes the understanding of everyday emotional events. It is during understanding that events take on meaning, significance, and emotional valence, all of which shape subsequent recall. The chapter describes some of the mental structures and operations that guide thinking and knowledge activation during understanding. It shows that inferences made during understanding often become part of the memory representation itself. Emotionally laden events have been hypothesized to be either more memorable or less memorable than emotionally neutral events. Some researchers have suggested that the effect depends on the intensity of the emotion, such that moderately intense emotional reactions improve memory, but extremely intense emotional reactions impair memory. The conditions that promote lying are often associated with the goals of self-protection and self-enhancement.
