The Effects Of Emotion Regulation Strategies On Memory Performance

Since 70's in the 20^th century, a lot of studies have been done to explore the relationship of emotion and cognition. On the other hand, in order to improve the students' academic performance, numerous schools both in China and abroad have developed various types of emotion regulation program to help students to cope with negative emotion, and to form effective emotion regulation strategies. Despite of these efforts, little is known regarding the relationship of emotion regulation and memory performance. For example, what kind of emotion regulation strategy would result in best memory performance? What are the underlying mechanisms for emotion regulation affecting memory? Answer to these questions will not only significantly advance our understanding on the relationship between emotion and cognition, but also contribute to the development of effective emotion regulation strategies that can reduce the negative effects of emotion on learning.Based on existing studies, the present studies examined three factors which might be influenced by emotion regulation strategies, and in turn would affect memory performance. These are emotional arousal, cognitive resource depletion, and cognitive processes in emotional regulation. The emotional arousal was measured by physiological monitoring (e.g., heart rate, r-interval. peak) and self-report of emotional arousal; cognitive depletion was measured by selective attention tasks using number (i.e., parity judgment) and letters (i.e., consonant-vowel judgment); cognitive strategies were measured by the memory performance in the verbal (i.e., memory of dialogue in the movie) and nonverbal emotional stimuli (i.e., memory of scene in the movie).A total of 123 college students participated in this study. They were randomly assigned into one of the four groups, namely, cognitive reappraisal, expression inhibition, control group (i.e., no regulation), and neutral-emotion group. The first three groups were asked to watch an about 6 minutes' movie clip that could arouse sad emotion. Different instructions of emotion regulation were given to each group. The neutral-emotion watched a similar length movie clip which did not arouse any...