Abstract
When people monitor their memory, their judgments of how much they have learned are influenced by the emotional valence of the to-be-learned material. A challenge is to discover why emotion influences people's monitoring judgments. Toward meeting this challenge, we discuss theory about how emotions may impact memory monitoring (through beliefs or experiences) and the prevailing evidence relevant to evaluating these theories. To foreshadow, our critical review of the evidence (a) suggests that people's beliefs about the relation between emotion and memory partly explain the effect of emotion on monitoring and (b) reveals avenues for future research to more fully understand the role of emotion in memory monitoring. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.