Suppress to Forget: The Effect of a Mindfulness-Based Strategy during an Emotional Item-Directed Forgetting Paradigm

Abstract

Forgetting is a common phenomenon in everyday life. Although it often has negative connotations, forgetting is an important adaptive mechanism to avoid loading the memory storage with irrelevant information. A very important aspect of forgetting is its interaction with emotion. Affective events are often granted special and priority treatment over neutral ones with regards to memory storage. As a consequence, emotional information is more resistant to extinction than neutral information. It has been suggested that intentional forgetting serves as a mechanism to cope with unwanted or disruptive emotional memories and the main goal of this study was to assess forgetting of emotional auditory material using the item-method directed forgetting (DF) paradigm using a forgetting strategy based on mindfulness as a means to enhance DF. Contrary to our prediction, the mindfulness-based strategy not only did not improve DF but reduced it for neutral material. These results suggest that an interaction between processes such as response inhibition and attention is required for intentional forgetting to succeed.

Effects of Brief Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Health-Related Outcomes: a Systematic Review

“…More than half of the studies (n = 47) recruited healthy university students as participants with 15 of these studies specifying meditation naïve participants (Banks et al 2015 Eisenbeck et al 2018;Feldman et al 2010;Gamboa et al 2017;Johnson et al 2015;Lai et al 2015;Lebois et al 2015;Liu et al 2013;Papies et al 2012;Pepping et al 2015;Steffen and Larson 2014;Zeidan et al 2010aZeidan et al , c, 2011. Fourteen studies recruited participants who had either a diagnosed mental health disorder or were classified as having maladaptive psychological responses (Azam et al 2015;Barnhofer et al 2010;Campbell-Sills et al 2006…”

“…The most common method of intervention delivery was by audio, with more than half of the studies using brief audio recordings (n = 49). After this, the most common mode of administration was verbal instructions (n = 14) by instructors or experimenters (Cullen et al 2007;Gamboa et et al 2010b, c). A further 13 studies used interventions used written instructions (Baquedano et al 2017;Herwig et al 2010;Hofmann et al 2009;A.…”

“…Only six studies did not report any significant findings for a MBI (Alberts et al 2013;Gamboa et al 2017;Grant et al 2013;Perkins-Porras et al 2018;Sharpe et al 2013;Szasz et al 2012); these studies investigated the effects on experimental pain tasks, food cravings, smoking cravings, COPD symptom distress, and cardiovascular reactivity and recovery. However, all six studies used a one-off mindfulness session, and a common conclusion among the authors was that longer or more frequent mindfulness sessions may be more impactful.…”

The challenge of forgetting: Neurobiological mechanisms of auditory directed forgetting

“…The fact that it interacts with a broad network may be one of the reasons for such flexibility. During the DF paradigm once the instruction has been delivered, in order to forget it is necessary to swiftly stop encoding of the TBF words, and unattend the TBF items to prevent further encoding and to suppress TBF word's representation to avoid retrieval [Gamboa et al, ; Hahn, et al, ; Zacks and Hasher, ]. In this scenario, the intervention of the PCG network could be crucial supporting the release of task engagement by means of self‐directed cognition [Mason et al, ; Pearson et al, ] and a rearrangement of functional activities that allow the establishment of a new strategy [Pearson et al, ].…”

“…It is known that information delivered with emotional content is more persuasive than neutral information [Leitman et al, ]; thus assessing the interaction between auditory intentional forgetting processes and emotions is of great interest. To the best of our knowledge emotional auditory DF so far has been evaluated only at the behavioral level [Gamboa et al, ; Yang et al, ]. Therefore, the goal of our study was first to explore intentional forgetting of auditory material, hoping to gain insight into the mechanistic underpinnings of DF and about the competing hypotheses proposed in the visual domain and second to investigate the effect of emotional material (negative, neutral) on the DF mechanism.…”