Dissociable effects of conscious emotion regulation strategies on explicit and implicit memory.

Abstract

The authors manipulated emotion regulation strategies at encoding and administered explicit and implicit memory tests. In Experiment 1, participants used reappraisal to enhance and decrease the personal relevance of unpleasant and neutral pictures. In Experiment 2, decrease cues were replaced with suppress cues that directed participants to inhibit emotion-expressive behavior. Across experiments, using reappraisal to enhance the personal relevance of pictures improved free recall. By contrast, attempting to suppress emotional displays tended to impair recall, especially compared to the enhance condition. Using reappraisal to decrease the personal relevance of pictures had different effects depending on picture type. Paired with unpleasant pictures, the decrease cue tended to improve recall. Paired with neutral stimuli, the decrease cue tended to impair recall. Emotion regulation did not affect perceptual priming. Results highlight dissociable effects of emotion regulation on explicit and implicit memory, as well as dissociations between regulation strategies with respect to explicit memory.Keywords: affect, cognitive control, emotion, emotion regulation, memory On a daily basis, lives are shaped by emotions, including joy at successes, sadness due to losses, and fear in the face of threats. However, emotions are often not experienced passively. Instead, individuals engage in emotion regulation (Gross, Richards, & John, 2006), attempting to modulate the behavioral, experiential, or physiological components of emotions (Gross, 1998b). Successful emotion regulation is associated with positive outcomes, including development of social competence (Eisenberg, Fabes, Guthrie, & Reiser, 2000) and improved subjective well-being (Larsen & Prizmic, 2004), whereas emotion dysregulation figures prominently in psychopathology (Gross & Munoz, 1995) and may be a precursor to problematic behaviors, including violence (Davidson, Putnam, & Larson, 2000).Various emotion regulation strategies have different behavioral effects, as demonstrated by investigations of reappraisal and expressive suppression. Reappraisal refers to cognitive attempts to change the meaning of stimuli, while expressive suppression refers to inhibition of emotionally expressive behavior (Gross, 1998b). Several studies have examined the effects of these strategies on stimulus encoding. Reappraising gruesome films as less distressing reduces self-reported negative emotion and physiological arousal (Lazarus & Alfert, 1964). Furthermore, using reappraisal to enhance and decrease responses to unpleasant pictures leads to increased and reduced startle responses, respectively (Jackson, Malmstadt, Larson, & Davidson, 2000), as well as increased and reduced activity in the amgydala (Ochsner et al., 2004). Less is known about the neural correlates of expressive suppression, but this strategy leads to increased sympathetic nervous system activity and does not effectively modulate unpleasant emotional experience (Gross, 1998a;Gross & Levenson, 1993.Thus, reappraisal and e...

Enhanced post-learning memory consolidation is influenced by arousal predisposition and emotion regulation but not by stimulus valence or arousal

“…These results support and extend our previous study (Nielson et al, submitted for publication) that showed better long-term retrieval (without the post-learning modulation manipulation) for these words in low reappraisers. However, the current results contrast with previous studies, which used short-term retention tests, and found either no effects of reappraisal on memory (Egloff et al, 2006;Richards & Gross, 1999) or enhanced retrieval in reappraisal (Dillon et al, 2007;Richards & Gross, 2000).…”

“…Previous studies have generally shown that suppression leads to reduced retrieval of high arousing, and in some cases low arousing, stimuli after short-term retention tests, in the absence of differences relative to the subjective experience of the stimuli (Bonanno et al, 2004;Dillon et al, 2007;Egloff et al, 2006;Richards, 2004;Richards & Gross, 1999, 2000. Our previous study (Nielson et al, submitted for publication), however showed that while there were no subjective differences in the experience of the stimuli, retention testing delayed by 1-week led to no memory reduction in suppression.…”

Neural Correlates of Emotional Memories: A Review of Evidence From Brain Imaging Studies

“…Although emotion regulation research has gained an increasing interest recently (Ochsner & Gross, 2005), the vast majority of functional neuroimaging studies to date tended to focus on the effect of cognitive control on the immediate emotional experience, rather than on the effect on memory (but see Dolcos, Sung, Denkova, Dixon, & Dolcos, 2011). Specifically, it is unclear how the engagement of various cognitive control strategies affect the impact of emotion on memory (but see Dillon et al, 2007), and the underlying neural circuitry. Investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying the effect of emotion regulation on memory processes has relevance to understanding clinical conditions such as depression and anxiety, in which emotion dysregulation is often among the core debilitating features.…”

“…If that was the case, given the evidence that some emotion regulation strategies increase emotional memory (Dillon, Ritchey, Johnson, & LaBar, 2007), preserved emotional enhancement of memory in aging could be a 'byproduct' of enhanced emotion regulation. These findings involving negative emotions, along with findings from studies investigating similar effects involving positive emotions (see also Kensinger & Schacter, 2008), are consistent with the positivity bias in remembering emotional memories reported in aging (Mather, 2006;Mather & Carstensen, 2005).…”

Effects of Reward and Punishment on Conflict Processing: Same or Different?

“…A number of studies have shown that they have different underlying cognitive mechanism (e.g., Dillon, Ritchey, Johnson, & LaBar, 2007). Thus, the second goal of the current study was to investigate what specific effects of reward and punishment have on conflict processing when they were explicitly associated with task-relevant dimension (ink color) and when they were implicitly associated with task-irrelevant dimension (word's semantic meaning) respectively.…”