title: Emotion regulation modulates anticipatory brain activity that predicts emotional memory encoding in women.
abstract: It has been shown that the effectiveness with which unpleasant events are encoded into memory is related to brain activity set in train before the events. Here, we assessed whether encoding-related activity before an aversive event can be modulated by emotion regulation. Electrical brain activity was recorded from the scalps of healthy women while they performed an incidental encoding task on randomly intermixed unpleasant and neutral visual scenes. A cue presented 1.5 s before each picture indicated the upcoming valence. In half of the blocks of trials, the instructions emphasized to let emotions arise in a natural way. In the other half, participants were asked to decrease their emotional response by adopting the perspective of a detached observer. Memory for the scenes was probed 1 day later with a recognition memory test. Brain activity before unpleasant scenes predicted later memory of the scenes, but only when participants felt their emotions and did not detach from them. The findings indicate that emotion regulation can eliminate the influence of anticipatory brain activity on memory encoding. This may be relevant for the understanding and treatment of psychiatric diseases with a memory component.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK. g.galli@ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Giulia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Galli
authors.forename: Victoria A
authors.initials: VA
authors.lastname: Griffiths
authors.forename: Leun J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Otten
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods; D003463:Cues; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult