| Emotion can enhance cognitive processes in several ways. Emotional stimuli tend to be remembered better than neutral stimuli, and emotional responses can help facilitate and guide decision-making. However, individuals in society are required to regulate their emotions considerably and the failure to do so properly is associated with a host of psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety and aggression. This dissertation investigated (1) whether one's voluntary emotion regulation changes the intensity of emotional arousal as assessed by subjective, physiological and functional neuroimaging measures, (2) the regional neural correlates of these changes, and (3) whether changes in emotional arousal produced by emotion regulation are associated with changes in subsequent emotional memory. To address these questions, two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 investigated the psychological and physiological effects of emotion regulation for affective pictures and the relation between these effects and subsequent memory for these pictures. In Experiment 1, two psychophysiological measures of emotional response, skin conductance and facial EMG, were measured while men and women viewed pictures containing emotionally negative or neutral content. Subjects were instructed to either cognitively increase (enhance condition) or decrease (detach condition) negative emotions elicited by the pictures, or to view the pictures without regulating their emotions. Memory was assessed with a short-delay free recall test and a 2-week delayed recognition test. Based on prior studies indicating that emotional arousal at encoding is a major determinant of subsequent memory, the following predictions were made: (1) Emotional arousal measured as skin conductance response increase or decrease during the enhance and the detach conditions, respectively, and (2) these changes in arousal would be associated with subsequent memory as assessed by recall and recognition. As predicted, enhancing negative emotion increased physiological arousal and enhanced subsequent recognition memory for the negative pictures. However, decreasing negative emotion did not alter physiological arousal. Examination of sex differences indicated that decreasing negative emotion produced a trend of increased arousal and significantly increased recognition memory for men, whereas decreasing emotion led to a insignificant decrease in both arousal and recognition memory for women. In Experiment 2, an event-related FMRI study was conducted to investigate the neural consequences of emotion regulation and how these are related to changes in emotional memory. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
