Emotion regulation modulates anticipatory brain activity that predicts emotional memory encoding in women

Abstract

It has been shown that the effectiveness with which unpleasant events are encoded into memory is related to brain activity set in train before the events. Here, we assessed whether encoding-related activity before an aversive event can be modulated by emotion regulation. Electrical brain activity was recorded from the scalps of healthy women while they performed an incidental encoding task on randomly intermixed unpleasant and neutral visual scenes. A cue presented 1.5 s before each picture indicated the upcoming valence. In half of the blocks of trials, the instructions emphasized to let emotions arise in a natural way. In the other half, participants were asked to decrease their emotional response by adopting the perspective of a detached observer. Memory for the scenes was probed 1 day later with a recognition memory test. Brain activity before unpleasant scenes predicted later memory of the scenes, but only when participants felt their emotions and did not detach from them. The findings indicate that emotion regulation can eliminate the influence of anticipatory brain activity on memory encoding. This may be relevant for the understanding and treatment of psychiatric diseases with a memory component.

Better Not to Know? Emotion Regulation Fails to Benefit from Affective Cueing

“…Most likely, informative cues already triggered an emotion allowing participants to anticipate what they would experience in response to the target. This possibility accords with existing evidence on cued affective responding (Kolassa et al, 2005; Kopp and Altmann, 2005; Miltner et al, 2005; Michalowski et al, 2009, 2014) and on the relation between LPP amplitude and emotion (Yang et al, 2012; Herbert et al, 2013; Langeslag and van Strien, 2013; Sarlo et al, 2013; Galli et al, 2014). …”

“…Spider phobics, as well as control participants, responded with greater LPPs to unpleasant and spider pictures as compared to neutral pictures and this effect was preceded by an analogous response to cues. Importantly, there is evidence that the LPP enhancement to both cues and targets can be dampened by emotion regulation (Herbert et al, 2013; Langeslag and van Strien, 2013; Galli et al, 2014). …”

Cue Valence Influences the Effects of Cue Uncertainty on ERP Responses to Emotional Events

“…Laboratory studies often use a cue-event paradigm to manipulate different categories of cues (e.g., Onoda et al, 2006Onoda et al, , 2007Onoda et al, , 2008Sarinopoulos et al, 2010;Grupe and Nitschke, 2011;Staudinger et al, 2011;Gole et al, 2012;Lin et al, 2012Lin et al, , 2014aLin et al, ,b, 2015aLin et al, ,d, 2017bLin et al, , 2018Yang et al, 2012;Aue et al, 2013;Gruber et al, 2013;Galli et al, 2014;Dieterich et al, 2016Dieterich et al, , 2017Qiao et al, 2018). In this paradigm, expectancy cues are presented before emotional events.…”

Anticipation of Negative Pictures Enhances the P2 and P3 in Their Later Recognition

“…Meanwhile, several functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and ERP studies found that anticipation of emotional pictures was relevant to their later recognition ( Mackiewicz et al, 2006 ; Galli et al, 2011 , 2014 ). In terms of fMRI studies, for example, the activation in the bilateral dorsal amygdala and the anterior hippocampus during anticipation of negative pictures was positively correlated to the later recognition performance of the pictures ( Mackiewicz et al, 2006 ).…”