The Moderating Role of Emotion Regulation in the Recall of Negative Autobiographical Memories

Abstract

When facing a negative event, people implement different strategies to regulate ongoing emotions. Although the previous literature has suggested that the emotional intensity of a negative episode is associated with the characteristics of the subsequent autobiographical memory, it is still unknown whether emotion regulation (ER) moderates this relationship. In the present study, we provided undergraduate students with a smartphone-based diary to report a negative episode immediately after its occurrence and rate the momentary use of two ER strategies: cognitive reappraisal and rumination. To explore autobiographical memory, two “surprise” recall tasks were performed one week and one month after the event. According to the results, cognitive reappraisal was linked with better memory performances, and a tendency to retrospectively underestimate the negativity of highly intense events was observed only in participants adopting high rates of this strategy. Conversely, intense rumination was found to be associated with less detailed memories of emotionally intense events, as well as with higher emotional involvement with negative episodes over time, regardless of their intensity. Together, our results support the maladaptive role of rumination and the adaptive influence of cognitive reappraisal on autobiographical memory.

The power of negative and positive episodic memories

“…As we described earlier, in the context of our discussion of the mediation model, an interesting aspect of cognitive reappraisal at encoding is that it can help to preserve memory for the content of an experience while stripping some of its affective intensity (Dillon et al, 2007;Richards & Gross, 2000). This pattern extends to autobiographical experiences: college students' use of reappraisal just after a negative event corresponded with better memory performance and with a tendency to later underestimate the emotional impact of the event (Colombo et al, 2021). When you want to remember the critique given to you by a coworker, while not being overcome with negative emotion during the interaction or when reflecting on it later, cognitive reappraisal may be the strategy of choice.…”

The Impact of Emotion and Sex on Fabrication and False Memory Formation

“…The students participated in two slight variations of the study run 8 months apart, where in the second one, a measure of how participants felt (emotion) was conducted before and after the viewing of the video clips. The emotion manipulation check was performed on 80 students and consisted of a five-item mood scale (relaxed, anxious, insecure, happy, and worried) which asked participants to rate how strongly they felt a given emotion at that exact moment, ranging from not at all (1) to very (5). Given the similarity across the two variations, the data sets were combined.…”

“…This is understandable given the overall context of witness interrogation. Emotion, however, particularly negative emotion, seems to play a critical role not only in how events are recalled [5,6] but also in how memory is affected by misinformation [7,8]. Participants are more prone to incorporate misinformation into their memory for negative compared to neutral or positive events [8][9][10][11].…”

Positive Emotion Regulations Among English as a Foreign Language Teachers During COVID-19

“…The notion of emotion regulation refers to one’s ability to control, handle, modify, and regulate the perception and expression of emotions caused by internal and external factors ( Wijaya, 2021 ). It is a process by which people make attempts to affect their encountering emotional experiences to accomplish personal ends ( Colombo et al, 2021 ). It is regarded as a social-emotional construct that focuses on both the maintenance and improvement of emotions as well as their inhibition and control ( Akbari et al, 2017 ).…”