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Existing collaborative memory research has shown statistically significant detrimental and beneficial effects (i.e., collaborative inhibition, error pruning, and post-collaborative memory benefit). However, it remains unknown yet whether they are modulated by stimulus emotionality of adjacent stimuli and whether they would differ in distinct memory tasks (item memory vs. source memory). To address these issues, the current study adopted the emotional timeout procedure, where participants individually studied a series of triplets (a preceding neutral word, a modulator word of taboo, nontaboo negative, neutral, or positive emotionality, and a following neutral word) displayed in red or green, and three recall sessions and a surprise recognition test was conducted afterwards. Results revealed reliable beneficial effects of collaboration. (a) The error pruning was reliably observed within ongoing and lasting collaboration in item memory tasks while it faded away post-collaboration in source memory conditions. (b) The post-collaborative memory benefit was confirmed in all word positions. It occurred in taboo, neutral, and positive words for modulators of different emotionality, while that of the preceding and following neutral words were insensitive to the emotionality of the modulator. The effect was only present in item memory, offering compelling evidence for dual-process models. (c) Collaboration facilitated the picked-up effect and the formation of shared memory. However, the detrimental effect of collaborative inhibition was absent in both memory tasks. These findings demonstrated that the mechanisms of the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis (RSDH) took effect under the emotional timeout procedure to a certain degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]