Decreased inhibitory control of negative information in directed forgetting

Neural modulation of directed forgetting by valence and arousal: An event-related potential study

“…The magnitude of directed forgetting was smaller for negative words at both levels of arousal, which was due to reduced suppression of negative TBF words relative to the other valence/arousal conditions. These findings are in line with prior studies suggesting that negative stimuli may be particularly difficult to intentionally forget (e.g., Hauswald et al, 2010;Yang et al, 2015). These findings also support the often observed "negativity bias" in which young adults show an advantage in attention and memory for negative relative to positive or neutral stimuli (Charles et al, 2003).…”

“…An examination of the related literature reveals a mixed pattern of results. Some studies have found that negative words enhance directed forgetting by facilitating recognition of TBR negative items (Brandt et al, 2013), while others have argued that negative items reduce directed forgetting driven by increased recognition of TBF negative items (Bailey & Chapman, 2012;Hauswald et al, 2011;Yang, Lei, & Anderson, 2015). Further observations have shown equivalent rates of directed forgetting across emotional and neutral words (Gallant & Yang, 2014;Patrick, Kiang, & Christensen, 2015;Yang et al, 2012).…”

“…Yet theoretical models of affect characterize emotion as varying along two dimensions of valence (i.e., pleasantness vs. unpleasantness) and arousal (i.e., activation vs. deactivation; Russell, 1980). The existing emotional directed forgetting studies have largely involved separate investigations of either highly arousing emotional stimuli against a low arousing neutral baseline (e.g., Brandt et al, 2013;Yang et al, 2015) or emotional stimuli matched on arousal to a neutral baseline (Gallant & Yang, 2014;Patrick et al, 2015). Although Bailey and Chapman (2012) attempt to disentangle the effects of valence and arousal in directed forgetting, their investigation used a simultaneous cuing procedure that did not allow for processing of emotional words prior to implementation of the cue.…”

The challenge of forgetting: Neurobiological mechanisms of auditory directed forgetting

“…In this study, we explored the behavioral and neural substrates of the intentional forgetting phenomenon in the auditory domain using valenced information (neutral, negative). Behaviorally, an interaction between emotion and instruction was only observed for the recognition but not for the free recall data which is consistent with previous research on the field [Yang et al, ]. We also observed a right lateralized brain response to the instruction to forget.…”

“…In the visual domain, intentionally forgotten words compared with incidentally forgotten words recruited the right IPL and MFG [Bastin et al, ], whereas negative words showed no activation. This difference has been attributed to an attentional bias caused by the emotional valence of the negative items, which apparently hinders correct execution of the inhibitory processes necessary for successful forgetting [Yang et al, ].…”