Data related to measures of physiological arousal during everyday life experiences and their relation to self-reports of subjective experience of both the event and its memory

Emotionally intense experiences lead to particularly durable and detailed autobiographical memories (AM) [1,2]. However, the influence of arousal on self-reports of the phenomenological characteristics of events and AMs is not direct, but moderated at the cognitive level [3,4]. To address how individual differences in emotional awareness moderate the physiology-subjective experience link, we collected data using a questionnaire from the mindfulness literature, the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ [5]). In addition, objective measures of physiological arousal while events naturally unfolded in everyday life contexts—outside the lab—were collected to map them onto self-reports of their phenomenological characteristics and those of their memories. In this article, we provide the full data for the FFMQ from a sample of 60 undergraduate students. We also display analyzed data of how markers of physiological arousal (i.e., electro-dermal activity, heart rate, and temperature) related to self-reports at two time-points of interest. First, we related these measures to same day self-reports of the characteristics of the experience. Then, we related these measures to self-reports and to arousal of their memories one week later, and in the lab. Detailed interpretation of this data, as well as in depth theoretical background is presented in “How is physiological arousal related to self-reported measures of emotional intensity and valence of events and their autobiographical memories?” [6].