Abstract
Previous research has suggested that regulating emotions through reappraisal does not incur cognitive costs. However, in those experiments, cognitive costs were often assessed by recognition memory for information that was contextually related to the emotionally evocative stimuli and may have been incorporated into the reappraisal script, facilitating memory. Furthermore, there is little research on the cognitive correlates of regulating positive emotions. In the current experiment, we tested memory for information that was contextually unrelated to the emotional stimuli and could not easily be related to the reappraisal. Participants viewed neutral and mildly positive slides and either reappraised, suppressed their emotions, or viewed the images with no emotion regulation instruction. At the same time, they heard abstract words that were unrelated to the picture stimuli. Subsequent verbal recognition memory was lower after reappraising than viewing, whereas non-verbal recognition memory (of the slides) was higher after reappraising, but only for positive pictures and when participants viewed the positive pictures first. Suppression had no significant effect on either verbal or non-verbal recognition scores, although there was a trend towards poorer recognition of verbal information. The findings support the notion that reappraisal is effortful and draws on limited cognitive resources, causing decrements in performance in a concurrent memory task.
Highlights
Most studies of emotion regulation to date have examined the down regulation of negative emotional responses [1,2,3]
Depression is posited to involve a dysregulation of reward processing, resulting in lower positive affect [5,6], and research has shown that the tendency to experience positive affect in response to positive events is independent from the tendency to experience negative affect in response to negative events [6]
It is important to examine the regulation of positive affective responses and how this may differ from the regulation of negative affect
Summary
Most studies of emotion regulation to date have examined the down regulation of negative emotional responses [1,2,3]. When seeing a co-worker slip on a wet floor in front of a ‘wet floor’ sign at work, an employee may feel amused at the situation but in consideration of their co-worker’s feelings may reinterpret the situation (reappraisal) by thinking about the potential negative consequences of the situation (perhaps the co-worker is injured) or suppress their emotional expressions of amusement. It is important to examine the regulation of positive affective responses and how this may differ from the regulation of negative affect. Studies to date have suggested that downregulating the response to positive emotional stimuli results in reductions in the subjective and physiological response [7], as well as a reduction in the late positive component of the event-related potential, thought to reflect attentional salience [8]
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