| This research examined the effects of sadness and emotion regulation on children's memory for educational material with 100 seven-year-old and 100 ten-year-old children. The first part of the research examined the effects of sadness on memory by having children watch either a sad or emotionally-neutral movie, followed by an educational movie. Children then were given recall and recognition tests on the material from the educational movie as well as a measure of motivation to engage in effortful behavior. Children who experienced the most intense sadness had poorer memory for details of the educational movie compared to children who did not report any sadness. This finding demonstrates the deleterious effect sadness can have on memory for educational material and the need for children to use emotion regulation strategies to ameliorate sadness so that learning can take place.; The second part of the study assessed the effects of different emotion regulation strategies on children's memory for subsequent educational material. After watching a sad movie, children were instructed to regulate sadness by using one of two strategies: Emotion Problem Solving or Emotion Suppression. A third group was not given any specific regulation instructions. Although past research finds that the use of suppression strategies prolongs emotional distress (e.g., Leitenberg, Henning, Turner, & Bennett, 1996; Carver et al., 1993; Epping-Jordan et al., 1999) and impairs memory for emotionally-relevant material (Richards & Gross, 1999, 2000), children in the present study who were instructed to engage in Emotion Suppression showed enhanced recall of the educational movie relative to children who received no instructions. The memory of older children was particularly likely to be enhanced by using the emotion regulation strategy of suppression. Finally, children were asked to describe how they had regulated their feelings of sadness. Across conditions, children who reported that they had reappraised the sad material showed better recall of the educational movie than children who did not report that they had reappraised. These findings suggest that asking children to temporarily suppress mild sadness in response to events that pose no personal threat improves memory for subsequent, emotionally-neutral information. In addition, the use of reappraisal by elementary-school-age children is associated with improved memory for the same type of information. The contexts in which suppression and reappraisal may be beneficial for memory are discussed. In addition, the positive effect that temporarily suppressing sadness has on non-emotionally-relevant memories is contrasted with the highly negative consequences of continually suppressing emotions stemming from traumatic experiences. |
