Autobiographical remembering regulates emotions: a functional perspective

ABSTRACT

Emotional deviation has been considered an essential factor in emotion regulation, in that, attempts to compensate for the deviation is reflected on cognitive processes. In the present study, we focused on autobiographical remembering and tested the functional role of memory on emotion regulation. We specifically examined the congruence effect in individuals’ subsequent memory reports after recalling emotional events. Individuals were randomly assigned to three groups to report either sadness or anger evoking events or emotionally unspecified events that they experienced in the last five years. Results supported mood-incongruence, but only for the emotional memory groups. Despite highly negative memories reported in the initial recall, individuals in anger- and sad-memory groups revealed an up-regulation trend in subsequent recall. Furthermore, sadness and anger induction affected phenomenological features of the subsequently reported memory. Overall, our findings supported for the emotion regulation function of remembering that serves counter-regulation of the negative emotion. We discuss potential mechanisms in the light of explanations by a functional approach to autobiographical memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• functions of remembering
• emotion regulation
• mood-incongruence
• discrete emotion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We tested the link between initial and subsequent valence also using conditional process modelling (i.e., moderated mediation models, Hayes & Preacher, 2014) in which the mediators were the distancing and recollective properties. Only the direct links between the valences were found significant and moderating variable was psychological distancing. When we repeated the analyses using psychological distance as the moderating variable (model 15, Hayes & Preacher, 2014), the pattern was maintained. In line with our assumptions to propose a structural model in which latent factors as well the interactive influence of valence and distancing, these findings provided further support for the simultaneous influence of recollection and distancing on the link between initial and subsequent recall.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the TÜBİTAK (Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştirma Kurumu) (The Scientific and Technological research council of Turkey) under Grant 2214-A.