Losing Control: Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts

Harrington, Marcus O.; Ashton, Jennifer; Sankarasubramanian, S.; Anderson, Michael C.; Cairney, Scott A.

doi:10.1177/2167702620951511

Cited by 42 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…These effects suggest persisting aftereffects of prefrontal control on the amygdala and its affective representations. Consistent with this possibility, retrieval stopping reduces physiological responses to scenes after suppression [ 37 , 57 , 59 ]. These affective attenuation effects likely reflect modulation by right LPFC.…”

Section: Retrieval Stopping: Neural Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 92%

Prefrontal-hippocampal interactions supporting the extinction of emotional memories: the retrieval stopping model

Anderson

Floresco

2021

Neuropsychopharmacol.

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Neuroimaging has revealed robust interactions between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus when people stop memory retrieval. Efforts to stop retrieval can arise when people encounter reminders to unpleasant thoughts they prefer not to think about. Retrieval stopping suppresses hippocampal and amygdala activity, especially when cues elicit aversive memory intrusions, via a broad inhibitory control capacity enabling prepotent response suppression. Repeated retrieval stopping reduces intrusions of unpleasant memories and diminishes their affective tone, outcomes resembling those achieved by the extinction of conditioned emotional responses. Despite this resemblance, the role of inhibitory fronto-hippocampal interactions and retrieval stopping broadly in extinction has received little attention. Here we integrate human and animal research on extinction and retrieval stopping. We argue that reconceptualising extinction to integrate mnemonic inhibitory control with learning would yield a greater understanding of extinction’s relevance to mental health. We hypothesize that fear extinction spontaneously engages retrieval stopping across species, and that controlled suppression of hippocampal and amygdala activity by the prefrontal cortex reduces fearful thoughts. Moreover, we argue that retrieval stopping recruits extinction circuitry to achieve affect regulation, linking extinction to how humans cope with intrusive thoughts. We discuss novel hypotheses derived from this theoretical synthesis.

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Section: Retrieval Stopping: Neural Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 92%

Prefrontal-hippocampal interactions supporting the extinction of emotional memories: the retrieval stopping model

Anderson

Floresco

2021

Neuropsychopharmacol.

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“…Participants showing superior SIF experience fewer intrusive memories in the week following a trauma video (Streb et al 2016). Emotional forgetting also has been reported: Successfully suppressing intrusive memories of negative scenes also reduces negative affect when later exposed to the scenes, on behavioral (Gagnepain et al 2017, Harrington et al 2020, skin-conductance (Harrington et al 2020), and heart rate deceleration measures (Legrand et al 2018). Suppressing fearful images of the future also reduces later apprehensiveness about those scenarios (Benoit et al 2016).…”

Section: Retrieval Suppression Yields Conflict Reduction Benefits and Affect Suppressionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Active Forgetting: Adaptation of Memory by Prefrontal Control

Anderson

Hulbert

2021

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

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180

162

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Over the past century, psychologists have discussed whether forgetting might arise from active mechanisms that promote memory loss to achieve various functions, such as minimizing errors, facilitating learning, or regulating one's emotional state. The past decade has witnessed a great expansion in knowledge about the brain mechanisms underlying active forgetting in its varying forms. A core discovery concerns the role of the prefrontal cortex in exerting top-down control over mnemonic activity in the hippocampus and other brain structures, often via inhibitory control. New findings reveal that such processes not only induce forgetting of specific memories but also can suppress the operation of mnemonic processes more broadly, triggering windows of anterograde and retrograde amnesia in healthy people. Recent work extends active forgetting to nonhuman animals, presaging the development of a multilevel mechanistic account that spans the cognitive, systems, network, and even cellular levels. This work reveals how organisms adapt their memories to their cognitive and emotional goals and has implications for understanding vulnerability to psychiatric disorders. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 72 is January 4, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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“…Anderson and Huddleston 32 , among others, considered a number of factors that may have contributed to the lack of suppression-induced forgetting in such studies. In addition to fatigue, trial duration, and sleep deprivation 33 , 34 , variability in task compliance is a prime suspect. Indeed, SIF depends on both the capacity to suppress unwanted memories and, critically, the motivation to do so repeatedly, such that the aftereffects of memory control can be detected.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Task compliance predicts suppression-induced forgetting in a large sample

Liu

Hulbert

Yang

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Suppression-induced forgetting (SIF) refers to a memory impairment resulting from repeated attempts to stop the retrieval of unwanted memory associates. SIF has become established in the literature through a growing number of reports built upon the Think/No-Think (TNT) paradigm. Not all individuals and not all reported experiments yield reliable forgetting, however. Given the reliance on task instructions to motivate participants to suppress target memories, such inconsistencies in SIF may reasonably owe to differences in compliance or expectations as to whether they will again need to retrieve those items (on, say, a final test). We tested these possibilities on a large (N = 497) sample of TNT participants. In addition to successfully replicating SIF, we found that the magnitude of the effect was significantly and negatively correlated with participants’ reported compliance during the No-Think trials. This pattern held true on both same- and independent-probe measures of forgetting, as well as when the analysis was conditionalized on initial learning. In contrast, test expectancy was not associated with SIF. Supporting previous intuition and more limited post-hoc examinations, this study provides robust evidence that a lack of compliance with No-Think instructions significantly compromises SIF. As such, it suggests that diminished effects in some studies may owe, at least in part, to non-compliance—a factor that should be carefully tracked and/or controlled. Motivated forgetting is possible, provided that one is sufficiently motivated and capable of following the task instructions.

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Losing Control: Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts

Cited by 42 publications

References 78 publications

Prefrontal-hippocampal interactions supporting the extinction of emotional memories: the retrieval stopping model

Prefrontal-hippocampal interactions supporting the extinction of emotional memories: the retrieval stopping model

Active Forgetting: Adaptation of Memory by Prefrontal Control

Task compliance predicts suppression-induced forgetting in a large sample

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