Memory for the cognitive components of and the affective reactions to an event

The study's purpose was to clarify the concept of repression in terms of its content as well as its mechanisms, to compare commonly used measures of repression to establish construct validity, and to address the larger issues of the effects of emotion on memory for information and accuracy of emotion memory. Participants were 131 undergraduate students who watched six film clips chosen to evoke various emotions (positive and negative). Participants completed measures assessing personality, emotional reaction, emotion recall, and cognitive recall. Repression was measured using two categorical scales (a combination of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale and the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, and the Mainz Coping Inventory) and two continuous scales (the Defense Mechanism Inventory and the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding). Some overlap was found between repression measures. Results suggest that the MAS/MC combination and the DMI measure affective components of repression, the MCI measures cognitive components, and the BIDR measures both. Repressors (compared to nonrepressors) reported less negative and more positive emotion prior to the experiment and reported less negative emotion after the films. Repression affected the reporting of some, but not all emotions. Thus, there was evidence for repression of negative but not positive emotions. In fact, repressors reported more positive affect perhaps as distraction against negative. Two weeks after seeing the films, repressors as a group accurately remembered their immediate, post-film negative emotions, whereas nonrepressors underestimated theirs. For all participants, initially intense negative emotions were underestimated at recall, whereas initially weak negative emotions were overestimated. Repressors recalled more plot-irrelevant cognitive details of the films than did nonrepressors. Repression occurred primarily at encoding as affect regulation rather than at retrieval, and was determined to be a partial rather than total phenomenon. Repressors vary in terms of being affect regulators or utilizing cognitive coping, suggesting there are different types of repression. Hence, results from studies using different measures of repression may not be comparable. Results contribute to clarifying the concept of repression as well as have implications for contrasting “empirical” versus “clinical” repression.