Cortisol effects on emotional and neutral memory consolidation are mixed, and both cortisol and emotion elicit selective memory processing. Our study manipulated post encoding cortisol between subjects using a psychosocial stressor to examine subsequent emotional and neutral consolidation competition effects using a within stimuli, object/background approach. While both groups had better emotional object memory compared to background memory, the stress group had additional competition effects for neutral objects and associated backgrounds over 24 and 48 hour delays. These findings suggest that neutral memories that were consolidated in the presence of elevated cortisol are processed similarly to emotional memory, and that cortisol may be an important post encoding memory tag to preserve neutral memory.