Emotions shape memory suppression in trait anxiety

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.

Reducing future fears by suppressing the brain mechanisms underlying episodic simulation

“…48,49,[73][74][75] but also neutral memories (e.g., refs. [28][29][30], and in both cases, the efficiency of this process is inversely related to trait anxiety (46,47) and rumination (76). More broadly, these findings echo the related literature on emotion regulation (see ref.…”

“…This hypothesis is consistent with the proposal that anxiety is characterized by a general deficiency in inhibiting threatrelated information (42), presumably resulting from an underrecruitment of the dlPFC (42)(43)(44). It is also consistent with more specific observations that anxious individuals and people with lower control over intrusive thoughts suffer deficits in their ability to suppress aversive memories (45)(46)(47)(48)(49). Given our hypothesis, such impaired memory control may extrapolate to the control of prospective thoughts.…”

“…Evidence from Stroop (70), antisaccade (71), and flanker tasks (72) demonstrates an inhibitory deficit in anxiety, with individuals showing a stronger deficiency also experiencing more negative intrusive thoughts (72). Consistently, we observed that anxious individuals were worse at attenuating their fears by suppression, a finding that mirrors their impairment in suppressing negative memories (45,(47)(48)(49). Anxiety may thus be characterized by a diminished control over the contents of one's awareness, a function in part mediated by processes controlling the retrieval of past happenings and the construction of future imaginings (see ref.…”

“…A recent study, for example, showed that anxious individuals are generally impaired at suppressing unwanted memories of any valence but that this deficiency is particularly pronounced for negative material (47). The efficiency of the inhibitory control process may thus vary with the valence of the to-be-suppressed content.…”

“…However, given that anxious people experience intrusive fears (12) and are also significantly impaired at suppressing negative memories (46,47), this raises the possibility that these individuals may be less efficient also at down-regulating their fears of the future by suppression.…”