Asmar Alyssa J, Chiew Kimberly S
Department of Psychology, University of Denver, 2155 South Race Street, Denver, CO, 80208, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2025 Feb;25(1):135-153. doi: 10.3758/s13415-024-01248-y. Epub 2025 Jan 6.
Emotion regulation is integral to well-being and adaptive behavior. Differing regulation strategies have important downstream consequences. Evidence suggests that reappraisal use can improve memory and reduce emotional reactivity to previously regulated stimuli. Reappraisal is cognitively demanding and dependent on prefrontal-based cognitive control processes typically enhanced by motivation. We recently demonstrated that motivational incentives increased reappraisal use and decreased negative affect during emotion regulation. It is currently unknown how incentive manipulations of emotion regulation affect later memory and affective response: some accounts suggest that motivation boosts memory relatively automatically, via dopamine input to hippocampus, whereas others suggest that motivated memory might depend on control allocation at encoding. In a 2-day online study, we examined how motivated emotion regulation relates to downstream memory and affect. Participants completed an emotion regulation task under baseline and incentive conditions, with recognition memory and affect examined ~ 24-hours later. Surprisingly, for stimuli encountered under incentive, memory decreased, challenging the hypothesis that motivational enhancements of memory occur automatically. Additionally, Day 2 affect did not significantly differ for stimuli encountered in baseline and incentive contexts, suggesting that incentive-related affective benefits were short-lived. In contrast, reappraisal predicted increased memory and reduced negative affect upon reencounter. These results suggest that incentive may have promoted global, potentially automatic changes in affect, independent from regulatory control processes that also could lead to affective change. Further characterization of these multiple pathways will be important for advancing a mechanistic understanding of emotion regulation and its consequences across motivational contexts.
情绪调节是幸福和适应性行为不可或缺的一部分。不同的调节策略会产生重要的下游影响。有证据表明，采用重新评估可以改善记忆，并降低对先前调节过的刺激的情绪反应性。重新评估对认知要求较高，且依赖于通常由动机增强的基于前额叶的认知控制过程。我们最近证明，动机激励在情绪调节过程中会增加重新评估的使用，并减少负面影响。目前尚不清楚情绪调节的激励操纵如何影响后续记忆和情感反应：一些观点认为，动机通过多巴胺输入海马体相对自动地增强记忆，而另一些观点则认为，有动机的记忆可能取决于编码时的控制分配。在一项为期两天的在线研究中，我们研究了有动机的情绪调节与下游记忆和情感之间的关系。参与者在基线和激励条件下完成了一项情绪调节任务，并在约24小时后对识别记忆和情感进行了测试。令人惊讶的是，对于在激励条件下遇到的刺激，记忆下降了，这对记忆的动机增强会自动发生这一假设提出了挑战。此外，在基线和激励情境中遇到的刺激，第二天的情感反应没有显著差异，这表明与激励相关的情感益处是短暂的。相比之下，重新评估预示着再次遇到刺激时记忆会增加，负面影响会减少。这些结果表明，激励可能促进了情感上的全局性、潜在的自动变化，独立于也可能导致情感变化的调节控制过程。进一步刻画这些多种途径对于推进对情绪调节及其在不同动机情境下后果的机制性理解至关重要。
