Holiday or hell? Emotion regulation and memory of depressive symptoms during lockdown.

Abstract

The ongoing repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic provide an unparalleled context to examine how distressing events are remembered. Prior theory and research suggest that (a) distress during lockdowns may fade and be remembered as less distressing, or remain salient and be remembered as more distressing, than initially experienced and (b) emotional suppression and cognitive reappraisal may predict these memory biases. We test these possibilities by assessing depressive symptoms and emotion regulation during two lockdowns: at the start of the pandemic (Lockdown 2020) and 17 months later (Lockdown 2021) in a sample of parents with young children (N = 272). We assessed tracking accuracy, directional bias, and projection bias in memory of depressive symptoms in Lockdown 2020, and the moderating role of emotion regulation at the time of encoding (Lockdown 2020) and recall (Lockdown 2021). People experiencing more depressive symptoms later in the pandemic (2021) remembered the start of the pandemic (2020) to involve more depressive symptoms than initially experienced (projection bias). People engaging in greater emotional suppression at recall (2021) were less likely to project their current depressive symptoms onto memory of the prior lockdown (lower projection bias) and remembered feeling lower depressive symptoms than initially experienced (underestimation directional bias). By contrast, people engaging in cognitive reappraisal at recall (2021) remembered feeling greater depressive symptoms than they initially experienced (overestimation directional bias). These unexpected results indicate that emotion regulation may shape memory of emotion during real-life challenges differently than patterns observed in lab-based research and may reflect helpful coping with life events.