Examining the effect of memory suppression on affective evaluation

Abstract

Intrusive memories happened a lot in humans, some people could override them, but some people may not, especially for those who are having mental disorders (Brewin et al., 2010). Numerous studies had been done on testing the effect of suppressing different types of memory on lowering memory accessibility. However, less is known about how memory suppression can change evaluation. In the present study, the widely used Think-no-Think (TNT) paradigm would be adopted to induce memory suppression and to find whether the valence of memory would influence the corresponding effect on memory accessibility and affective evaluation. Our results showed that memory suppression and valence of memories responded independently and differently to memory accessibility and affective evaluation. The no-think items indeed weakened the self-reported and the experimenter-rated memory accessibility and diminished the affective evaluation towards the no-think stimulus. For the valence of memory, it had an opposite trend on gist and details in memory accessibility. Negative items happened to have higher gist but lower details, which may be attributed to the emotional memory trade-off effect that prompts the memorization of the central theme at the expense of neutral background details (Payne et al., 2008). En masse, our results not only found the effect of memory suppression and valence on memory accessibility but also found the effect on affective evaluation. Our results provided initial evidence supporting the relationship between memory and evaluation. Further research is essential for the improvement in external validity and convincing evidence by testing with autographical memories and the time delay effect.