Forgetting emotional and neutral words: An ERP study

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

“…Posteriorly, TBR cues were hypothesized to elicit more positive deflections in late time windows indicative of an LPC to support the selective rehearsal of TBR words. When examining emotional effects on cue-related activity, consistent with prior studies, the emotional tone of words was not expected to modulate frontal activity associated with TBF words (Brandt et al, 2013;Hauswald et al, 2011). The LPC associated with TBR cues, however, may be more affected by the emotional tone of stimuli due to greater selective rehearsal of emotion, which -again -may be particularly enhanced for negative stimuli.…”

“…In the literature, a few studies have examined ERPs associated with attempts to intentionally forget emotional relative to neutral words (e.g., Brandt et al, 2013;Hauswald et al, 2011;Yang et al 2012). Consistent with prior research, these studies found enhanced LPCs for TBR relative to TBF stimuli coupled with greater frontal positivity for TBF than TBR items.…”

“…When examining emotional effects, however, Brandt et al (2013) suggest that emotion had a specific impact on brain processes involved in intentionally remembering TBR items, but not those required to suppress TBF information. That is, the LPC following TBR cues showed more positive activity during negative high arousing relative to neutral words.…”

“…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.…”