From Movies to Conversations: The Role of Emotion and Structure in Making Sense of Experience

In everyday life, individuals are exposed to a continuous stream of information, yet they neither process nor retain all of it. Instead, they organize and interpret what they encounter, constructing meaning selectively. This process is shaped by both emotional salience and the structural organization of experience. In Study 1, I used large language models (LLMs) to quantify emotional arousal in narrative stimuli and to measure memory fidelity for central and peripheral information in free recall. The results showed that emotionally arousing events are associated with better recall of central information at the expense of peripheral information. In Study 2, I developed a topic modeling pipeline to analyze naturalistic conversations, constructing topic networks to capture the conversational structure. The results show that both emotional and structural features of the interaction significantly predict conversational enjoyment, including self-disclosure (the depth of content) and topic recurrence (how often topics are revisited). Together, these findings illustrate how emotion and structure jointly shape sense-making across narratives and social interactions, and demonstrate how computational methods can be leveraged to study experience in naturalistic settings.