An Experimental Study Of Cognitive Reappraisal Affecting Autobiographical Memory

Cognitive reappraisal is a widely used emotion regulation strategy to reduce emotional response by adjusting people's understanding of the event itself and its meaning.Autobiographical memory is a kind of explicit memory about a person's self and life events.It contains not only rich sensory,perceptual information,and emotional characteristics,but also the individual's subjective evaluation of the events.Therefore,individuals can learn from the events experienced in the past and also have the ability and confidence to face the problems in the future.This study investigated the relationship between autobiographical memory and cognitive reappraisal.We compared the conscious and spontaneous retrieval of autobiographical memory from different perspectives and further explored the cognitive neural mechanism of autobiographical memory retrieval.This study provides empirical evidence for the emotional regulation effect of cognitive reappraisal and provides inspiration for the intervention of psychological distress under negative emotions.In this study,three experiments were conducted to examine the impact of cognitive reassessment of college students on spontaneous and conscious autobiographical memory retrieval.Experiment 1 used the Autobiographical Memory Test(AMT),which was a mixed design of 2(emotion regulation strategies: simply view,cognitive reappraisal)×3(emotional valence of autobiographical memory cue words: negative,neutral,and positive),to explore the specific content of the individual consciously extracting autobiographical memory and explore the influence of emotion regulation strategies and the emotional valence of cues on the specificity and vividness of conscious autobiographical memory extraction.The results showed that emotion regulation strategies and the emotional valence of cue words affect the specificity of conscious autobiographical memory extraction,and the specificity of autobiographical memory in the cognitive reappraisal group is significantly higher than that in the simple view group.In the simple view group,the specificity of autobiographical memory triggered by neutral cue words was significantly higher than that of negative cue words.Experiment 2 used the vigilance task paradigm,which was a mixed design of 2(emotion regulation strategies: simple view,cognitive reappraisal)× 3(valence of spontaneous extraction: negative,neutral,and positive)to explore the effects of emotion regulation strategies.The influence of the number and vividness of involuntary autobiographical memory retrieval of different emotions.The results showed that emotion regulation strategies have no significant effect on the extraction of involuntary autobiographical memory.Whether it is in the simple view or the cognitive reappraisal group,the number of autobiographical memories with positive and negative emotional valence extracted by subjects spontaneously is significantly higher than that of neutral autobiography memory.Experiment 3 adopts a mixed experimental design of 2(emotion regulation strategies: simple view,cognitive reappraisal)× 3(autobiographical memory cue valence: negative,neutral,positive),to explore the effects of emotion regulation strategies and cue emotion valence on the number,vividness and response time of conscious autobiographical memory,and explore the processing mechanism of autobiographical memory from the perspective of electrophysiology.The results showed that emotion regulation strategies and cue valence affect the extraction of conscious autobiographical memory.In the simple-viewing group,the number of autobiographical memories with positive and neutral emotion valence is higher than that with negative emotional valence.The response time of memory retrieval is significantly longer than that of retrieval of autobiographical memories with neutral and positive valence.According to the results of three experimental studies,the following conclusions can be drawn:(1)The generality level of autobiographical memory decreased when individuals used the cognitive reappraisal strategy to regulate negative emotions and then consciously retrieved autobiographical memory.At the same time,the effect of cognitive reappraisal on the generalization level of voluntary autobiographical memory was moderated by emotional cues,and the effect of cognitive reappraisal on the concretization of negative emotional valence autobiographical memory was greater.(2)Whether or not the cognitive reappraisal strategy was used before the retrieval,the autobiographical memory performance of the individuals who consciously extracted the negative emotional valence was slower than that of another emotional valence autobiographical memory.The LPP amplitude of negative autobiographical memory in the middle frontal region time window was significantly larger than that of neutral autobiographical memory,which indicated that the retrieval of negative autobiographical memory required more cognitive resources.(3)The effects of cognitive reappraisal on autobiographical memory were moderated by the types of autobiographical memory retrieval.The autobiographical memory of voluntary retrieval was more significantly affected by cognitive reappraisal,while the autobiographical memory of involuntary retrieval was not affected by cognitive reappraisal.(4)Whether or not the cognitive reappraisal strategy was used before the retrieval,individuals were more inclined to retrieve more emotional autobiographical memories than neutral emotional memories when involuntary extracting autobiographical memories.