Emotion regulation promotes forgetting of negative social feedback: Behavioral and EEG evidence

Abstract

Receiving negative social feedback, e.g., social rejection, criticism, can bring social pain. Unable to forget such painful experiences often results in sustained mental distress, thereby contributing to the onset of psychiatric disorders such as depression. Here, we asked when people received negative social feedback, whether engaging in emotion regulation strategies such as cognitive reappraisal and distraction would relieve social pain and facilitate forgetting of unwanted social feedback. Besides, we examined whether and how individual differences in depressive symptoms may influence the neural activity and behavioral benefits of emotion regulation. During the experiment, participants received positive and negative social feedback about their personality that were claimed to be from their peers. While reading social feedback, participants were instructed to either naturally watch or actively down-regulate their negative emotions using either cognitive reappraisal or distraction strategy, with electroencephalograms (EEGs) being recorded. Subsequently, participants completed a surprise recall test during which they verbally recall the feedback upon seeing photos of peers from the previous session. We also measured participants’ self-evaluation and attitudes towards peers. Memory about social feedback, self-evaluation and attitudes toward peers were measured immediately after, and in 24 hours again to examine possible long-term benefits of emotion regulation. Participants’ EEG activities during emotion regulation were examined using both the event-related potential (ERP) and the multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA). Results showed that both cognitive reappraisal and distraction attenuated negative emotion and promoted forgetting of negative social feedback. Importantly, the mnemonic benefits of emotion regulation, i.e., forgetting of negative social feedback, were still evident on Day 2 after a 24-hour delay. In addition, participants' depression level significantly moderated the whole brain EEG activity patterns involved in different emotion regulatory strategies. Specifically, in the low-depression group, frontal-central EEG activity distinguished between watch and reappraisal conditions within 2~5 s, with the decoding accuracy predicted participants' subsequent memory performance. Whereas in the high-depression group, the whole-brain EEG activity patterns could distinguish between watch and distraction conditions within 2~3 s post-feedback. Moreover, the amplitude of central-parietal late positive potential (LPP) under the distraction condition were negatively correlated with participants’ depression level, suggesting that participants with higher depressive symptoms might be more effective in using distraction to regulate negative emotion than their low-depression counterparts. Together, these results demonstrate that both cognitive reappraisal and distraction strategies could alleviate social pain and facilitate forgetting of negative social feedback. Moreover, distraction may be a more suitable regulatory strategy particularly among individuals with high levels of depression. In conclusion, this study broadens our understanding of the relationship between emotion and memory from the perspectives of social cognition and motivated forgetting; and provides insights for the alleviation of social pain using emotion regulation strategies.