Abstract
The question that motivated this study was to investigate the relation between trait anxiety, emotions and memory control. To this aim, memory suppression was explored in high and low trait anxiety individuals with the Think/No-think paradigm. After learning associations between neutral words and emotional scenes (negative, positive, and neutral), participants were shown a word and were requested either to think about the associated scene or to block it out from mind. Finally, in a test phase, participants were again shown each word and asked to recall the paired scene. The results show that memory control is influenced by high trait anxiety and emotions. Low trait anxiety individuals showed a memory suppression effect, whereas there was a lack of memory suppression in high trait anxious individuals, especially for emotionally negative scenes. Thus, we suggest that individuals with anxiety may have difficulty exerting cognitive control over memories with a negative valence. These findings provide evidence that memory suppression can be impaired by anxiety thus highlighting the crucial relation between cognitive control, emotions, and individual differences in regulating emotions.
Highlights
It is probably wishful thinking that some experiences in life are best forgotten in order to protect our mental well-being
The mean accuracy for each condition was: for the Low Trait Anxiety group: positive scenes: M = 89.90, SD = 13; negative scenes: M = 84.85, SD = 13; neutral scenes: M = 87.27, SD = 10; for the High Trait Anxiety group: positive scenes: M = 86.26, SD = 13.7; negative scenes: M = 86.87, SD = 13.3; neutral scenes: M = 87.56, SD = 13.2. These analyses show that the groups do not differ for memory encoding capacity which in principle might have affected the observed results concerning memory suppression, see below
The present study examined whether memories for emotional scenes could be forgotten, by considering individual differences in trait anxiety in the Think/No-think paradigm
Summary
It is probably wishful thinking that some experiences in life are best forgotten in order to protect our mental well-being. If these memories are not controlled, they might become intrusive in our consciousness (Erskine et al, 2007) This is especially the case of negative memories that have the capacity to unsettle our mental life by continuously intruding into cognitive operations. In some conditions, such as post-traumatic stress (PTSD) or anxiety disorders, the retrieval of these memories may cause serious distress and mental impairment (McNally, 2006; Schönfeld et al, 2007; Banich et al, 2009; Depue, 2012). Persistent intrusive thoughts are a key source of distress across many forms of psychopathology (Magee et al, 2012)
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