PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Emotion Regulation and Memory: The Cognitive Costs of Keeping One's Cool Jane M. Richards and James J. Gross Stanford University An emerging literature has begun to document the affective consequences of emotion regulation. Little is known, however, about whether emotion regulation also has cognitive consequences. A process model of emotion suggests that expressive suppression should reduce memory for emotional events but that reappraisal should not. Three studies tested this hypothesis. Study 1 experimentally manipulated expressive suppression during film viewing, showing that suppression led to poorer memory for the details of the film. Study 2 manipulated expressive suppression andreappraisalduring slide viewing. Only suppression led to pooler slide memory. Study 3 examined individual differences in typical expressive suppression and reappraisal and found that suppression was associated with poorer self- reported and objective memory but that reappraisal was not. Together, these studies suggest that the cognitive costs of keeping one's cool may vary according to how this is done. Western culture is decidedly ambivalent about emotions. On the one hand, emotions are seen as wanton marauders that supplant good judgment with primitive, immature, and destructive thoughts and impulses (Young, 1943). On the other hand, emotions are seen as indispensable guardians of our well-being that direct our re- sponses to life's challenges (Leeper, 1948). As is so often the case with intractable ambivalence, each side of the "emotions are harmful-emotions are helpful" divide cap- tures part of the truth. Recognizing this fact, emotion researchers have begun to examine how individuals go about regulating their emotions and have begun to document what consequences such attempts at emotion regulation have {Gross, 1998b). There are countless ways of regulating emotions (Parrott, 1993), but one particularly common form of emotion regulation is down- regulating negative emotions. Examples include construing a crit- ical remark as helpful rather than hurtful or simply maintaining the appearance of having taken no offense (DePaulo, Kashy, Kirken- dol, Wyer, & Epstein, 1996 Gross & Richards, 2000). Despite the fact that researchers, philosophers, and layper- sons alike have had an age-old fascination with emotional Jane M. Richards and James J. Gross, Department of Psychology, Stanford University. This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH58147. We thank Gordon Bower, Laura Carstensen, Ian Gotlib, and Oliver John for their helpful advice concerning this program of research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jane Richards, who is now at the Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Guthrie Hall, Box 351525, Seattle, Washington 98195- 1525, or to James Gross, Department of Psychology, Stanford Univer- sity, Stanford, California 94305-2130. Electronic mail may be sent to jane2000@u.wa5hington.edu or to james@psych.stanford.edu. control, empirical data regarding the consequences of emotion down-regulation are of relatively recent vintage (e.g., Eisen- berg, Fabes, & Losoya, 1997 Gross, 1998a Thayer, Newman, & McClain, 1994). Most of these data concern the affective consequences of emotion regulation. This is natural enough. Feeling bad and looking worse are no fun, and it stands to good reason that we would often want to soften these negative feelings and expressions. If one major aim of emotion regula- tion is to influence emotions, then the first order of business certainly should be to figure out whether emotion regulation actually alters the experiential, behavioral, and physiological components of the emotional response. However, feeling good and looking better are not one's only priorities during emotionally trying times. People also wish to function at their best cognitively. This comes as no surprise when one considers that emotions frequently arise when important goals are at stake���and, thus, when peak cognitive performance is crit- ical, hi light of mounting evidence that emotional and cognitive processes are tightly interwoven in everyday life (Damasio, 1994) and that people often regulate their emotions to preserve cognitive functioning (Gross & Richards, 2000), we sought to extend the boundaries of emotion regulation research by asking two related questions. First, does emotion regulation lead people to remember events differently then they would have absent these processes, or are emotion regulatory processes so overlearned that they unfold with no cognitive cost? Second, if emotion regulation does have discernible cognitive consequences, are these consequences the same for all forms of emotion regulation, or do they vary according to how the emotion is regulated? In the following sections, we first define what we mean by emotion regulation. We then consider whether emotion regulation might influence one's memory for the events that transpire while Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, Vol. 79. No. 3.410-424 Copyright 2CO0 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/0W55.OO DOI: 1O.1037/70O22-3514.79.3.410 410

EMOTION REGULATION AND MEMORY 411 one is regulating emotion, and if so, whether there is reason to believe that different forms of emotion regulation should have different cognitive consequences. Emotion Regulation Emotion regulation refers to the evocation of thoughts or be- haviors that influence which emotions people have, when people have them, and how people experience or express these emotions. Because emotions may be regulated in almost limitless ways, we have found it helpful to adopt a consensual model of emotion to provide an overarching framework for studying emotion regulation (Gross, 1998b, 1999). This model focuses on the processes by which emotion is generated and makes a distinction between two broad classes of emotion regulation. According to this model, emotion regulatory efforts may be directed at two different points in the emotion generative process. Antecedent-focused emotion regulation is evoked at the front-end, or very early on in the emotion-generative process, whereas response-focused emotion regulation occurs at the back-end, or afteT emotion response ten- dencies have been triggered. Thus, response-focused regulation mops up one's emotions antecedent-focused regulation keeps them from spilling in the first place. In the context of a potentially stressful situation, antecedent- focused emotion regulation might take the form of construing a potentially emotional situation in a way that decreases its emo- tional relevance (e.g., Beck, 1991 Lazarus, 1991 Scherer, 1984), a process that has been called reappraisal (Gross, 1998a). For example, appraising an upcoming task as a challenge rather than a threat (e.g., Tomaka, Blascovich, Kibler, & Ernst, 1997), constru- ing an upcoming medical procedure as beneficial rather than painful (e.g., Lazarus & Alfert, 1964), and believing gory photo- graphs of dead people to be pulled from a fictitious movie rather than police files (Kramer, Buckhout, Fox, Widman, & Tusche, 1991) can drastically reduce subjective emotion experience and concomitant emotion-expressive behavior. In other words, because reappraisal is antecedent to a potentially upsetting event, if effec- tive, it actually preempts full-blown emotional responses. By contrast, response-focused emotion regulation occurs much later in the emotion generative process. In the case of this back- ended form of emotion regulation, individuals do not nip emotion in the bud by virtue of construing an event up front in less emotional terms. Rather, response-focused emotion regulation is evoked after an event already has been appraised in emotional terms and thus has triggered emotional response tendencies. Fre- quently, this kind of emotion regulation takes the form of inhib- iting the urge to act on emotional impulses that continually press for expression, as when one bites his or her lip to keep from crying or maintains a poker face despite having been dealt a great hand of cards. This process, which we term expressive suppression, has affective consequences that differ from reappraisal.1 Whereas re- appraisal leads to global reductions in emotional responding, ex- pressive suppression appears to selectively decrease emotion- expressive behavior (Gross, 1998a Gross & Levenson, 1993). Emotion Regulation and Memory What effects���if any���might emotion regulation have for cog- nitive processes? In the following section, we describe two quite different possibilities. Emotion Regulation Is Effortless One possibility is that emotion regulation allows one to look and feel better during emotional circumstances without any discernable cognitive costs. Emotion theorists have long em- phasized that emotion regulation is widespread among adults in Western cultures, and some theorists have gone so far as to argue that it is rare to see adult emotion that is not regulated (Tomkins, 1962). Frontal brain structures that allow for emo- tion regulation are evident in infants as young as 9 months (Fox, 1994), and by age 6, children have developed a sophisticated arsenal of emotion regulatory strategies (e.g., Cummings, 1987 Harris, 1989 Saarni, 1984). By adulthood, managing how one looks and feels would seem a natural candidate for the growing list of automatic responses one draws upon in everyday life (Bargh, 1997 Greenwald & Banaji, 1995) and would seem so overlearned that it would have no impact on cognitive activities such as attending to information for later recall. Emotion Regulation Is Effortful A quite different possibility is suggested by Baumeister and colleagues9 ego-depletion model (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Mu- raven, & Tice, 1998 Muraven, Tice, & Baumeister, 1998), which holds that any sort of self-regulation depletes mental resources. Linking this model to emotion regulation in particular, Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister (1998) conducted an emotional-film-viewing study in which an experimenter told some participants to "try to deny any emotions you may feel.. ..When I look over the video- tape of your facial expressions, I don't want to be able to tell which videotape you are watching" (M. Muraven, personal communica- tion, September 16,1997). Results revealed that regulation partic- ipants (relative to no-regulation controls) persevered for a shorter period of time on a subsequent hand grip task. In a similar study testing the effects of this emotion-regulation manipulation on a subsequent anagram task regulation participants were found to solve fewer problems than no-regulation participants (Baumeister et al., 1998). Although these studies do not show that emotion regulation impairs performance on tasks coincident with emotion regula- tory efforts, attentional models of self-regulation suggest that this should be the case (e.g., Carver & Scheier, 1981). Such models portray attention as a finite resource. Efforts to maintain or change behaviors evoke a negative feedback loop whereby an existing condition of a system is compared with some salient standard. If a discrepancy between the two is detected, an operating process is evoked to lessen this discrepancy and achieve the desired state or behavior (Macrae, Bodenhausen, & Milne, 1998). These self-monitoring processes serve important self-regulatory functions. However, they may do so at a cost. Strategically evaluating and modifying one's thoughts, feelings, or behaviors may have the effect of decreasing attentional 1 The term suppression has been used to describe the inhibition of feelings (Freud, 1915/1957), emotion-expressive behavior (Gross & Lev- enson, 1993), vocalizations (Brandimonte, Hitch, & Bishop, 1992), and thoughts (Wegncr, 1994). To avoid confusion, we use the term expressive suppression to refer to conscious efforts to inhibit overt emotion- expressive behavior.

412 RICHARDS AND GROSS resources available for other tasks (Ellis & Ashbrook, 1989). Much of the support for the idea that emotion regulation con- sumes cognitive resources derives from studies in which emo- tion regulation is the dependent variable (DePaulo, Blank, Swaim, & Hairfield, 1992 Wegner, 1994 Wegner, Erber, & Zanakos, 1993). For example, Wegner et al. (1993) found that mood regulation success was reduced by cognitive load. This research suggests that emotion regulation consumes cognitive resources, but it does not show that it does so at the expense of other concurrent tasks. Indeed, we are aware of only one report that has tested whether emotion regulation influences memory. This research, which examined women only, found that expres- sive suppression reduced memory for orally presented informa- tion accompanying emotion-eliciting slides (Richards & Gross, 1999). Integration Although the automaticity, ego-depletion, and attentional views differ in a number of ways, each offers a blanket prediction that lumps together different forms of emotion regulation. On the automaticity view, emotion regulation is overlearned and is thus cognitively inexpensive. On the ego-depletion and attentional views, emotion regulation is consumptive of finite self-regulatory energy or attentional resources. However, is it really reasonable to assume that all forms of emotion regulation are going to be either cognitively inexpensive or cognitively costly? To address this question, we drew upon the consensual model of emotion discussed earlier, which makes a distinction between antecedent-focused emotion regulation and response-focused emo- tion regulation (Gross, 1998b, 1999). This distinction between emotion regulatory efforts that occur before (e.g., reappraisal) and those that occur after (e.g., expressive suppression) an event un- folds suggests lhat these forms of emotion regulation might have different cognitive costs due to differing self-regulatory demands. Emotion regulation that requires continual self-monitoring and ongoing self-corrective action during an emotional event, such as expressive suppression, should require a continual outlay of cog- nitive resources and thus should decrease the fidelity of memory. By contrast, emotion regulation that is evoked early on in the emotion generative process, such as reappraisal, should not require continual self-regulatory effort during an emotional event. Enter- ing into a situation after having construed it in less emotional terms should preempt a full-blown emotional response and thus obviate the need for continual self-regulatory effort, leaving memory for the details of the events that transpire intact. The Present Research Typically, people form memories by simply experiencing events as they unfold around them and not by actively memorizing or rehearsing their details. For this reason, we tested our prediction that expressive suppression should lead to poorer memory for details of emotional events, whereas reappraisal should not, by conducting three studies in which incidental memory was assessed. In the first study, we experimentally manipulated expressive sup- pression in a controlled laboratory setting to test whether this specific form of emotion regulation had any discernible effects on memory for visual and auditory material presented during the suppression period. Once we were convinced that expressive sup- pression impaired memory, we conducted a second study in which we manipulated both expressive suppression and reappraisal and administered two different types of memory tests to explore the roles of self-focus and self-monitoring in producing any memory decrements. Finally, in a third study, we tested whether naturally occurring individual differences in suppression and reappraisal were associated with memory in everyday life. Study 1: Does Expressive Suppression Impair Memory? Three criteria must be met to test whether expressive suppres- sion impairs memory: (a) Emotion must be elicited in a controlled situation, (b) participants' expressive behavior must be manipu- lated, and (c) convergent memory measures must be obtained. To meet these criteria, we used a short film clip known to elicit negative emotion. This permitted us to control the information presented during the emotion induction period. We manipulated emotion-expressive behavior by randomly assigning participants to one of two instructional conditions (Gross & Levenson, 1993, 1997). Half of the participants were given instructions to inhibit emotion-expressive behavior during the film clip (expressive sup- pression condition). The rest of the participants received no reg- ulation instructions (watch condition). To assess the effects of suppression on memory, we used a verbal cued-recognition test for auditory and visual details contained within the film clip. We chose this type of test over a nonverbal recognition test involving photo spreads���a favorite of traditional emotion and memory research (e.g., Christianson & Loftus, 1987 Christianson, Loftus, Hoffman, & Loftus, 1991)���because we questioned whether a nonverbal test would be sensitive to memory differences resulting from decreases in depth of processing and verbal encoding (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) that should derive from the self-monitoring processes associated with expressive suppression. Method Participants Fifty-three participants (45% men, 55% women) who had not seen our stimulus film before participated to fulfill a course requirement or to receive monetary compensation. On average, participants were 19.8 years old (SD = 1 . 7 years). The ethnic composition of this sample was 4% African American, 26% Asian American, 62% Caucasian, and 8% Hispanic. Procedure Participants were run in mixed-gender group sessions by a female experimenter (mean number of participants per group = 4.7 range = 1 to 8). After signing a consent form, participants completed a baseline self- report measure of emotion experience so that we could assess whether our subsequent emotion induction increased negative emotion levels above preinduction levels. Then, participants were told that they would view a brief film clip (described below). Immediately before viewing this clip, the entire group of participants was randomly assigned to one of two experi- mental conditions. Participants in the watch condition (AT - 28) were told the following: "I will show you the film clip in just a moment. Please watch and listen to it carefully." Participants in the expressive suppression con- dition (N ��� 25) were told the following: