Instruction to forget lead to emotional devaluation

Abstract

These findings suggest that the Distractor Devaluation effect previously reported in the attention field can be generalized to memory. This is one the first studies to show an influence of memory processes, namely forgetting, on emotion.

Cognitive-behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of the affective consequences of ignoring stimulus representations in working memory

“…In a recent investigation we demonstrated that using active inhibition processes to prevent the recall of long-term memory representations (i.e., during a Think/No-think task) results in their affective devaluation . This result aligns with findings by Vivas et al (2016) who also showed devaluation following active inhibition that was applied during a directed forgetting paradigm. Collectively, these results suggest that active inhibitory processes result in affective devaluation.…”

“…Despite the differences between the Think/Nothink paradigm and the visual search paradigms used in previous studies, and despite having subjects ignore internal memory representations rather than external stimuli, our findings were strikingly similar to those of past distractor devaluation studies: We found that the ignored no-think items were disliked compared to baseline items. Vivas et al (2016) also observed a similar long-term memory effect using a directed-forgetting task to elicit inhibition of stimulus memories. The similarity of these findings in long-term memory tasks to past distractor devaluation effects in visual search raises a question: Is affective devaluation a fundamental property of inhibition, occurring regardless of what we ignore and how?…”

“…For example, the effect has been replicated in many different types of search tasks (Fenske, Raymond, & Kunar, 2004;Raymond, Fenske, & Westoby, 2005) using many different types of external sensory stimuli (Ferrey, Frischen, & Fenske, 2012;Goolsby, Shapiro, & Raymond, 2009a;Veling, Holland, & van Knippenberg, 2007). Moreover, we and others (Vivas, Marful, Panagiotidou, & Bajo, 2016) have recently demonstrated that devaluation does not only occur after ignoring stimuli in the environment, but is also a consequence of stopping the retrieval of representations in long-term memory. Thus, devaluation may be a consequence of inhibition through both internal and external attentional mechanisms (Chun, Golomb, & Turk-Browne, 2011).…”

Affective evidence that inhibition is involved in separating accessory representations from the active representation in visual working memory

“…Such evidence has accumulated across a variety of attention tasks that require participants to avoid interference from distractors, including those involving two-item target localization (Raymond et al, 2003), simple-feature and difficult-conjunction search , preview search (Fenske, Raymond, & Kunar, 2004), and central-target discriminations (Martiny-Huenger, . Affective devaluation also occurs for stimuli from which a motor-response has been withheld in Go/No-go (Kiss et al, 2008) and Stop-signal (Wessel & O'Doherty, 2014) tasks, and whenever a mental representation of the item is ignored in working memory (De Vito, Ferrey, Fenske, & Al-Aidroos, 2018) or is suppressed in long-term memory during Think/No-Think or item-based directed-forgetting (Vivas et al, 2016) tasks.…”

“…Specifically, we examined whether a marker of inhibition-the distinctly negative affective evaluations that result from the inhibition of sensory stimuli (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003), their representations in memory Vivas, Marful, Panagiotidou, & Bajo, 2016) or associated motor-responses (Fenske, Raymond, Kessler, Westoby, & Tipper, 2005;Kiss, Raymond, Westoby, Nobre, & Eimer, 2008)would be evident in the stimulus ratings of items that had just been maintained in visual working-memory in an accessory state. Finding affective devaluation of prior accessory items, relative to baseline and prior active items, would be consistent with the view that inhibition is used to reduce the activation of currently-irrelevant working-memory items in an accessory state below the activation level of the active memory representation.…”