Studies have consistently found that arousal is associated with enhanced recognition and recall. In these studies, the influence of participant sex was unexamined. However, motivational theories of emotion predict evolutionarily bound emotional experiences with specific mediated content which vary between men and women. This study draws upon motivational theories of emotion and recent evidence from neuroimaging research to examine comprehensive effects of message arousal and emotional tone on memory for message detail as a function of sex. Female participants showed an advantage in processing peripheral detail when information was positive and when questions about details were in a verbal cued recall format. Male participants were immune to memory narrowing for highly arousing negative content when questions about details were posed in a visual recognition task format.