Incomplete inhibition of emotion in specific autobiographical memories

Abstract

Emotional inhibition in recollection of specific autobiographical memories (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) is investigated in two experiments. Less complete emotional inhibition was hypothesised to correspond to a reduced sense of psychological closure. Emotional inhibition was identified by comparing the effect of emotion words relative to lifetime period words as primes. In Experiment 1, emotion words facilitated recognition judgements of descriptions of remembered experiences rated low in closure. In Experiment 2, emotion words facilitated recognition judgements of descriptions of a laboratory experience made lower in closure. A sense of psychological closure may therefore be a prerequisite for strategic emotional inhibition. Implications for adjustment and goal pursuit are discussed.

Acknowledgements

Portions of this research were presented at the annual conventions of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2001 and the Association for Psychological Science in 2006. We thank Krystle Disney, Adam Kaltenbach, Micah Scott, Aneeqa Ishtiaq, Elizabeth Wilson, Travis Crone, and Karen Naufel for their assistance in conducting Experiment 2.

Notes

¹For half of participants, the memory stayed on the screen until the key was pressed. For the other half, there was a 2500-ms window during which the participant had to respond for a correct response to be recorded. The time window was exceeded on 2.4% of the trials, which did not differ for low- and high-closure memories. The presence of the time window sped up responses by about 250 ms per trial, but it did not affect the number of hits or false alarms nor did it interact with hypothesis-relevant results. Therefore, Experiment 1 results are presented collapsed across the time window variable. The time window was used for all participants in Experiment 2 to reduce variability in latencies.

²The predicted effect was also qualified by gender, F(1, 68) = 4.04, p<.05, MSE=0.03, η²=.06, with the effects stronger among male than female participants. Because this gender interaction did not occur in Experiment 2, it is not considered further.

³A higher-order interaction also obtained because participants responded more quickly to the unpleasant low-closure than high-closure foil memories; it was therefore irrelevant to the hypothesis.

⁴The reasons listed were also submitted to text analysis using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker & Francis, 1995). Interestingly, participants in the higher-closure condition used somewhat more words referring to emotion in their reasons listing (Ms = 2.5% and 4.2%), t(48) = − 1.99, p<.06. This counterintuitive result occurred in part because participants discussed the absence of emotion in the higher-closure condition. For example, one participant wrote, “You can either do the puzzles or get stressed and give up” and another wrote, “I had trouble doing it but got through it.” Thus, participants in the higher-closure condition often discussed emotion in terms of inhibiting or overruling the emotion, consistent with the hypothesised process. Note that because participants used somewhat fewer words referring to emotion in generating reasons why the experience was lower in closure, priming effects cannot be due to rehearsal of emotion words in connection with thoughts of the experience.