Abstract
During times of emotional stress, individuals often engage in emotion regulation to reduce the experiential and physiological impact of negative emotions. Interestingly, emotion regulation strategies also influence memory encoding of the event. Cognitive reappraisal is associated with enhanced memory while expressive suppression is associated with impaired explicit memory of the emotional event. However, the mechanism by which these emotion regulation strategies affect memory is unclear. We used event-related fMRI to investigate the neural mechanisms that give rise to memory formation during emotion regulation. Twenty-five participants viewed negative pictures while alternately engaging in cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, or passive viewing. As part of the subsequent memory design, participants returned to the laboratory two weeks later for a surprise memory test. Behavioral results showed a reduction in negative affect and a retention advantage for reappraised stimuli relative to the other conditions. Imaging results showed that successful encoding during reappraisal was uniquely associated with greater co-activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus, amygdala, and hippocampus, suggesting a possible role for elaborative encoding of negative memories. This study provides neurobehavioral evidence that engaging in cognitive reappraisal is advantageous to both affective and mnemonic processes.
Highlights
When faced with a distressing situation, individuals often attempt to assess and regulate their resulting negative emotions
These results indicate that emotional distress for negative picture viewing was reduced when participants engaged in emotion regulation, with greater reduction during reappraisal than suppression
The contrast of view > suppress revealed bilateral activation in the amygdala (Figure 3B; Table 1). These results suggest that viewing negative pictures activated a network of regions implicated in emotion, and that engaging in emotion regulation was effective in reducing amygdala activity
Summary
When faced with a distressing situation, individuals often attempt to assess and regulate their resulting negative emotions. Engaging in cognitive reappraisal enhances explicit memory performance (Richards and Gross, 2000; Richards et al, 2003; Dillon et al, 2007). In addition to being associated with diminished memory performance, suppression is generally inferior to reappraisal in reducing negative affect after viewing negative film clips (Goldin et al, 2008) and negative pictures (Richards and Gross, 2000), and prior to broaching a relationship conflict with a romantic partner (Richards et al, 2003). The available evidence suggests that engaging in cognitive reappraisal may be beneficial for memory even in the throes of emotional distress, whereas suppression may lead to the formation of incomplete representations of the negative event
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