School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom.
Brain Cogn. 2012 Mar;78(2):133-47. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2011.11.004. Epub 2012 Jan 11.
Emotionally arousing information is treated in a specialised manner across a number of different processing stages, and memory for affective events is often found to be heightened by virtue of this. However, in some cases, emotional experiences might be the very ones that we would like to forget. Here, two item-method directed forgetting studies are presented which investigate people's ability to intentionally forget affective words when stimuli and memory instructions are presented simultaneously. In the first experiment an interaction between task instruction and emotional content was evident in a diminished directed forgetting effect for emotional words, suggesting that they may be relatively resistant to deliberate forgetting. The interaction between instruction and emotion appeared both in free recall of words and in a yes-no recognition task. In the second study, an ERP procedure was utilised to investigate whether emotion modulates the effects of instruction during the initial encoding of stimuli. Recognition data again showed a clear interaction between instruction and emotion, with a reduced directed forgetting effect for emotional words. The ERP data demonstrated evidence for individual effects of both emotion and instruction during encoding; however, despite this, no evidence for an interaction between these factors was evident in the ERP data. As such, we conclude that even when study items are presented simultaneously with their associated memory instructions, neither does emotion prevent differential processing of directed forgetting instruction, nor does memory instruction prevent differential processing of emotion during early encoding. Implications are discussed in relation to the directed forgetting literature and more broadly with respect to circumstances under which emotion and cognitive processing work in parallel or in competition with each other.
情绪唤醒信息在多个不同的处理阶段以特殊的方式处理，并且由于这种处理，情感事件的记忆通常会增强。然而，在某些情况下，情绪体验可能正是我们想要忘记的。在这里，呈现了两个项目方法定向遗忘研究，这些研究调查了当刺激和记忆指令同时呈现时，人们是否能够有意地忘记情感单词。在第一个实验中，任务指令和情绪内容之间的相互作用在情绪单词的定向遗忘效应减弱中表现明显，这表明它们可能相对难以遗忘。指令和情绪之间的相互作用在单词自由回忆和是-否识别任务中都有体现。在第二项研究中，使用 ERP 程序来研究在刺激的初始编码过程中，情绪是否调节指令的作用。识别数据再次显示了指令和情绪之间的明显相互作用，情绪单词的定向遗忘效应降低。ERP 数据表明，在编码过程中，情绪和指令都有个体影响；然而，尽管如此，ERP 数据中并没有证据表明这些因素之间存在相互作用。因此，我们得出结论，即使在研究项目与相关的记忆指令同时呈现的情况下，情绪也不会阻止定向遗忘指令的差异处理，记忆指令也不会阻止情绪在早期编码过程中的差异处理。讨论了这些结论对定向遗忘文献的意义，以及更广泛地讨论了情绪和认知处理在什么情况下并行或相互竞争。
