How does emotion regulation influence the emotional enhancement of memory?

Emotion regulation at the time of encoding stimuli into memory can affect the extent of subsequent emotional enhancement of memory (e.g. Dillon et al., 2007). It has been argued that emotion regulation exerts its influence on memory via stimulus elaboration leading to greater depths of processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) rather than via influence on emotional arousal. Emotion regulation can be manipulated at encoding to enhance or decrease emotions, by instructing participants to reappraise stimuli according to its personal relevance. We investigated the degree to which participants successfully created emotional change via emotion regulation strategies by measuring change in physiological arousal (galvanic skin response and heart rate) and examined how this related to their emotion regulation behaviours in everyday life. The impact of emotion regulation on emotional enhancement of memory for central and peripheral elements of stimuli was measured by free recall and recognition. This extended previous research to allow examination of the impact of emotion regulation on central-peripheral trade-offs that have consistently been found in the emotional enhancement of memory (e.g. Kensinger et al., 2007). Implications of these findings for stimulus elaboration and emotional arousal theories of the impact of emotion regulation on memory will be discussed.