Social Recall Context Moderates the Relationship Between Autistic Traits and Episodic Memory: Evidence from an Emotional Film Paradigm

How an emotional experience is later recalled, shared with another person or held privately, shapes what is remembered as much as the experience itself. This thesis examined whether autistic traits related differently to memory for an emotionally intense film depending on the type of memory involved, gist, perceptual detail, or character and emotional content, and on the social context in which the experience was recalled: narrating it to an empathic listener versus recalling it alone. The study was designed to test Weak Central Coherence (WCC) theory, which proposes that autistic traits are associated with a detail-focused processing style in which attention to local features comes at the expense of integrating information into broader, coherent representations; from this perspective, memory for perceptual detail might be expected to remain relatively preserved even as more integrative aspects become vulnerable. Forty adults viewed a neutral and a trauma-analogue film; after each film, participants either narrated their experience aloud to an empathic listener or reflected on it alone, and completed memory assessments immediately afterward and one week later. Higher autistic traits predicted significantly lower memory for perceptual detail and for character and emotional content specifically when participants had narrated their experience to a listener, with no such relationship when they recalled the film alone; a separate, weaker trend linked higher autistic traits to lower gist memory overall, independent of recall condition. Contrary to WCC theory's prediction that detail memory would remain protected, detail memory declined alongside character and emotional memory once social narration was involved. These findings suggest that the detail-focused processing account proposed by WCC may not generalize straightforwardly to socially demanding recall situations, and that autistic traits interact with the social and cognitive demands of recalling an emotional experience to another person to shape what is remembered and forgotten. Keywords: autistic traits, episodic memory, social recall, empathy, Weak Central Coherence, emotional memory