An examination of Emotion Regulation strategy use on recognition memory

Emotion regulation (ER) refers to the use of various strategies to modify an emotional response and has important implications for memory of emotional events. During this study, participants were instructed to first enhance, maintain, or suppress their emotional responses while viewing unpleasant and neutral images and then report the ER strategies they used during the task. A surprise memory test for these images known as the Remember/Know procedure was then conducted immediately after encoding and following a one-week delay. Overall, negative images were better remembered than neutral images. Moreover, images paired with the instruction to enhance one’s emotional responses were better remembered than images paired with the instruction to maintain or suppress, on the first test day only. Specific types of ER strategies used were not reliably associated with memory for emotional images. This research is the first to inform of the impact of spontaneous ER strategy use on memory.