Suppressing but not intensifying emotion decreases arousal and subjective sense of recollection

Abstract

Emotional memories are commonly recalled with an increased subjective sense of recollection but not necessarily with more accurate context recollection, depending on the type of context. Response-focused emotion regulation techniques, such as suppressing and intensifying emotion expression, can alter subjective arousal and later memory and confidence about memory. Here, we investigated if emotion suppression affects later subjective sense of recollection as well as context recollection for different types of details. To disentangle the contribution of arousal modulation versus potential cognitive costs of emotion suppression effects on later subjective sense of recollection, we further explored if intensifying emotion expression similarly affects later subjective sense of recollection and actual context recollection as emotion suppression. We found that emotion suppression decreases the subjective sense of recollection, while intensifying emotion expression has no effect on the subjective sense of recollection. In contrast, suppressing emotion did not affect the recollection of extrinsic and intrinsic contextual details, while intensifying emotion expression decreased recollection of intrinsic item features of emotional scenes. In conclusion, response-focused emotion regulation techniques with distinct effects on subjective arousal differentially affect the subjective sense of recollection and memory for contextual details. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).