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Consequences of specific processing of emotional information: Impact of general versus specific autobiographical memory priming on emotion elicitation
Pierre Philippot, Alexandre Schaefer & Gwénola Herbette « Université de Louvain » at Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Accepted in Emotion, May 2003
Running Head: EMOTIONAL INFORMATION PROCESSING
Authors' notes The writing of this chapter has been facilitated by grants from the "Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique" 8.4508.95 and 8.4512.98. The authors express their gratitude to Martin Conway as well as two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Pierre Philippot who is at Faculté de Psychologie, Université de Louvain, place du Cardinal Mercier, 10, B- 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet to "
[email protected]".
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 2 Abstract The relation between emotion intensity and the voluntary activation of personal memories was investigated in two experiments. Two hypotheses were compared: the “specificity hypothesis,” which states that emotion intensity is positively related to the specificity of personal memories, and the “strategic inhibition hypothesis,” which postulates that specifying past experiences requires the inhibition of emotion. Study 1 showed that priming a specific (versus overgeneral) access mode to autobiographical memory results in less emotion during a subsequent mental imagery trial. Study 2 replicated Study 1 with a wider array of emotions and a different method of emotion induction (films). Overall, results support the strategic inhibition hypothesis. The notion of specificity is discussed as well as implications for cognitive theories of emotion and their clinical applications.
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 3 Consequences of specific processing of emotional information: Impact of general versus specific autobiographical memory priming on emotion elicitation
“I raised my lips to a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my all body ... An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. ... Whence could it have come to me, this allpowerful joy? ... And suddenly, the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday morning at Combray ..., when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.” (Proust, 1913).
In everyday life, seemingly trivial events can trigger distinct emotional feelings because they evoke memories of past emotional experiences. In this famous excerpt from one of Proust’s novels, the simple taste of a biscuit evokes memories of the past in the character, who reexperiences emotions he lived years ago. From their own observations, most people would admit that memories of past experiences are an important determinant in the attribution of an emotional meaning to a given situation. With very few exceptions (e.g., Arnold, 1950; Mandler, 1984), this common sense evidence has not received much attention from emotion theorists. (For a review of this point, see Philippot and Schaefer, 2001.) Indeed, most recent approaches to emotion and memory have focused on how emotion influences memory, not on memory processes’ involvement in emotion (e.g., Christianson & Safer, 1996; Destun & Kuiper, 1999; Ochsner, 2000). Further, the role of
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 4 episodic memory processes has not been considered explicitly by theories of emotional appraisal. Thus, to date, our theoretical understanding of the role of personal memories in the elicitation and regulation of emotion is still incomplete and has not incorporated recent advances in cognitive models of autobiographical memory (e.g., Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Rubin, 1996). At the empirical level, however, recent clinical studies have documented interesting relationships between chronic emotional states and episodic memory processes. Specifically, Williams (1996; Williams, Stiles, & Shapiro, 1999) has shown that depression is associated with an overgeneral retrieval mode for personal memories, whatever the emotional tone of the memory. Depressed individuals have difficulties accessing specific personal memories, that is, discrete personal episodes with a precise and circumscribed location in time and space (e.g., “I was afraid last Saturday afternoon when I was attacked by a big dog while I was jogging on Pleasant Street”). Rather, they report overgeneral memories, that is, personal episodes that are extended in time or repetitive, with no precise location in space or time (e.g., “I am afraid when I am attacked by dogs while I am jogging”). The development of a specific retrieval mode for autobiographical memory is associated with a lower risk for relapse into depression and effective relapse prevention treatments (Williams, Teasdale, Segal & Souslby, 2000). Williams and his collaborators (1999) propose that the phenomenon of overgeneral memory results from a protective mechanism from acute emotions associated with specific memories. By remaining at a general—and thus more abstract—level of information, individuals attempt to avoid the reactivation of acute and painful emotions felt in specific personal experiences. This style of specific cognitive avoidance could be learned early in childhood following a traumatic experience. As a consequence, some individuals might under-develop the
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 5 cognitive processes required for reconstructing specific episodic memories (Perner & Ruffman, 1995). Congruent with the notion that the overgeneral memory bias is a protective mechanism against unpleasant experience, Raes, Herman, de Decker and Eelen (In press) have observed that students reporting an extremely high proportion of overgeneral memories in an autobiographical memory test (90th percentile) were less distressed by a frustrating task than students reporting an extremely low proportion of such memories (10th percentile). However, such correlational evidence is always subject to the criticism of a possible confound with a third variable that is irrelevant to the task. More generally, this correlational evidence does not provide information with respect to the underlying processes generating the observed effect. Further, there are well known instances in the study of emotion regulation where correlational effects show patterns opposite to those from experimental manipulation effects. For instance, Manstead (1991) has demonstrated that when facial expression is experimentally manipulated, less expression results in less emotional arousal; however, in correlational studies, individuals who are naturally facially less expressive respond with more arousal in emotional situations. In sum, the observation of Raes and collaborators (In press) need to be replicated, and it should be examined with respect to whether or not it can be generalized to the manipulation of an overgeneral retrieval mode. Another line of research has documented the notion that processing emotional material at a specific level (i.e., by activating specific, emotion-relevant information) arouses more intense emotion than processing it at a general level. Lang, Melamed and Hart (1970) have shown that, during an emotional imagery task, individuals displayed greater physiological arousal if they were instructed to activate specific information, especially information related to bodily responses. Accordingly, Lang (1984, 1993) has repeatedly advocated making emotional information as
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 6 specific as possible for proper induction of emotion via mental imagery. The same rationale and recommendations are used in clinical procedures in which emotions are to be activated (e.g., Foa & McNally, 1996). However, it should be noted that a greater arousal is observed only when bodily responses are specified to participants, irrespective of the type of bodily response (Acosta & Vila, 1990; Lang et al., 1970). No effects are observed when details of the situation or event— which are the most defining features of specific memories—are given. Hence, while it shows that focusing attention on bodily response potentiates emotion, this line of research does not provide evidence that specifying memory of the emotional event increases emotional arousal. In sum, although no definitive conclusion can yet be drawn, the research reviewed so far has been guided by the notion that activating emotional memories at a specific level generates more acute emotion than activating them at an overgeneral level. Consequently, people might attempt to regulate their emotion by avoiding activation of specific information and by remaining at an overgeneral level. Based on these considerations, one should predict that the emotional intensity felt during an emotional experience should be associated with the specificity of evoked memories—a notion that we will label hereafter the “specificity hypothesis.” In other words, the more specifically past memories are evoked, the more intensely the emotion should be felt. Similarly, priming a specific retrieval mode in memory before emotion induction should activate specific emotional information and should lead to more intense emotion than priming an overgeneral retrieval mode. This notion is further supported by recent evidence that the dimension of overgenerality/specificity is sensitive to the cognitive state prevailing prior to autobiographical memory task (Watkins & Teasdale, 2001; Watkins, Teasdale & Williams, 2000).
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 7 However, different predictions are made if one approaches this question from the perspective of autobiographical memory models. First, to understand the relation between personal memory activation and emotion, two modes of autobiographical memory retrieval should be considered (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000): direct retrieval and generative retrieval. In direct retrieval, an autobiographical memory is automatically activated by certain cues. This occurs when a stable pattern of activation emanating from event-specific knowledge is established and linked to the working memory goals of the individual (Conway & PleydellPearce, 2000, p. 275). This process is almost instantaneous, requires few cognitive resources, interrupts on-going activities, and may result in a memory rich in specific details, although this memory may be partial and not cover the whole scene. The emotion associated with the memory would also be automatically reactivated. The phenomenon of flashback in PTSD (Brewin, 2001) may constitute an extreme example of direct retrieval triggered by specific emotional information. In contrast, generative retrieval is an effortful process by which the individual willfully reevokes—or rather, re-constructs—past personal memories. It requires important cognitive resources and the activation of executive processes, involving strategic attentional focus, comparison of activated memory material with the retrieval target, etc. (Conway & PleydellPearce, 2000; Schacter, Norman and Koutstaal, 1998; Rubin, 1996). This constructive process would start with a general memory that would be progressively specified (Norman. & Schacter, 1996; Schacter, Norman,& Koutstaal, 1998). When voluntary re-evoking an emotional memory, this slow and effortful process may be disturbed by the parallel activation of emotion and therefore eventually aborted. Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) have argued that to avoid such disturbances, human memory has evolved in two separate systems, with one, more general, storing “goal-related” (in other words, emotionally-relevant) information and the other storing
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 8 event-specific information. As a further protection against emotional disturbances, strategic memory search for memories of specific events would implicate a process of inhibition of the link between event-specific information and the general emotional content that might have been activated when the event occurred (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). From these considerations, it follows that direct retrieval of a specific emotional memory should be associated with the activation of the corresponding emotion. However, in generative retrieval, efforts in specification should be linked to an inhibition of emotion information, a notion that we will label hereafter the “strategic inhibition hypothesis.” Thus, in generative retrieval, a specific retrieval mode of personal memory should be associated with an inhibition of the related emotion. On the other hand, remaining at an overgeneral level does not involve the strategic and effortful searching process and thus does not result in the inhibition of emotion. In addition, if emotion is aroused during generative retrieval, the specification process will be disrupted and aborted, resulting in the activation of a general memory. The notion that willfully specifying emotional information should result in less emotional arousal than processing it at a general level has been recently documented by a brain imaging study from our laboratory (Schaefer, Collette, Philippot et al., 2003). During emotional imagery trials using standard scripts (Vrana, Cuthbert, Lang, 1986), participants were instructed to process either overgeneral or specific sentences about the emotional scenario. Processing overgeneral sentences during the emotion induction task led to more intense emotional feelings, greater increases in heart rate, and more activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex than did processing specific sentences. These results were replicated in another study without brain activity recording (Schaefer & Philippot, in preparation). These observations are congruent with the notion that willfully processing emotional information at a specific level results in less
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 9 emotional arousal than does processing it at a general level. However, as these studies used impersonal information (standard emotional scripts), it is uncertain whether the same effect would be observed with personal memories. In sum, the two perspectives reviewed, the specificity hypothesis and the strategic inhibition hypothesis, lead to opposite predictions with respect to the relationship between autobiographical memory specificity and emotional arousal, at least in the case of generative retrieval. According to the specificity hypothesis, processing emotional information at a specific level should increase emotional intensity, whereas the opposite is predicted by the strategic inhibition hypothesis. The studies presented in the present article aim to test one perspective against the other by examining the differential impact of activating either a specific or an overgeneral access mode to autobiographical memory on the intensity of emotional feeling state felt during a subsequent emotion induction. In the first study, emotion induction was accomplished by a mental imagery procedure. Study 2 replicates Study 1 with a wider array of emotions and a different method of emotion induction: emotional film excerpts.
Study 1 One way to test directly one hypothesis against the other is to constrain people to process emotional memories in a specific or in a general mode and to observe the effects of this manipulation on the emotional intensity felt during a subsequent emotion induction. This procedure presents the advantage of allowing implementation of the experimental manipulation before emotion induction and, therefore, observation of potential effects in rigorously identical emotion induction conditions. It is further justified by the fact that the dimension of
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 10 overgenerality/specificity has been demonstrated to be sensitive to the cognitive state prevailing prior to an autobiographical memory task (Watkins & Teasdale, 2001; Watkins et al., 2000). For these reasons, before undergoing an emotion induction using mental imagery, participants in Study 1 were instructed to activate either specific or general personal memories. This procedure was intended to prime emotional information processing either in a general or in a specific processing mode. In a control condition, participants performed a purely semantic task. The intensity of the emotion felt during the induction was the dependent measure. The priming condition was manipulated within participants. Method Participants and overview Forty-five undergraduate students (39 women and 6 men), between 19 and 21 years of age, volunteered to participate in this experiment for course credit. The experiment was conducted in two separate sessions in laboratory rooms of the department of psychology. During the first session, participants received a diary to report daily emotional experiences. This procedure was used to obtain material for the emotional scripts to be used in the mental imagery procedure--material selected to be personally relevant while minimizing memory bias due to a long delay between event and recollection. In the second session, which took place two weeks later, participants were trained in a procedure of emotion induction via mental imagery. They then had to report personal memories—either general or specific—that were evoked by three imagery scripts constructed from three events from their diary. Finally, after being primed with general or specific autobiographical memory (AM), they relived the three emotional scripts through a mental imagery procedure. The main dependent measure was the emotional intensity felt during this re-evocation.
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Procedure During the first session, participants were told that the study concerned the impact of daily emotions on their quality of life. They received a diary that they were instructed to fill in every evening over a 12-day period. In the diary, they had (a) to describe very briefly (in 3 lines) two negative emotional events they had experienced during the day, (b) to choose from a list of seven negative emotions (frightened, sad, angry, disgust, revolted, ashamed or contemptuous) the emotion label that best described each event, and (c) to rate each event on an emotional intensity scale anchored from 0 (“no emotion”) to 10 (“the strongest emotion ever experienced”). After the 12-day diary period, participants gave their diaries back to the experimenter and received an appointment for the experimental session. From among the 24 events reported in each diary, the experimenter selected for each participant’s experimental tasks the three events in his or her diary that were closest in intensity to the median emotional intensity he or she reported. To avoid primacy or recency effects, it was ascertained that these events were drawn from all the portions of the 12 day period, F(2,43)= 0.92, ns. These events did not differ in terms of emotional intensity, F(2,43)= 0.49, ns. For the training task, two other events were selected: one among the most intense events, and the other among the weakest in intensity. The experimental session took place two weeks after the first session, in two laboratory rooms. It comprised three tasks. First, participants were trained in the mental imagery procedure; next, they were asked to report AM associated with the diary events selected by the experimenter; finally, after the experimental manipulation, they were asked to relive the selected events via a mental imagery procedure.
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 12 Training task. Participants were received individually and seated in a comfortable armchair and the room’s lighting was dimmed. The experimenter went to the next room, where he or she operated the apparatus. Communication with the participants was maintained throughout the experiment via an interphone system. Participants practiced emotional mental imagery for each of the two training events. Following the recommendations of Vrana et al. (1986), participants first went through a short relaxation procedure: They had to close their eyes, to relax every muscle (including their faces), to breathe deeply and regularly, and to maintain a mental image of a circle for about 2 min. Next, the experimenter read the script of one of the training events and instructed participants to relive it as intensely as possible for 20 sec. Then, they filled in the emotional intensity scale anchored from 0 (“no emotion”) to 10 (“the strongest emotion ever experienced”). Association task. The association task was divided into three stages: First, the experimenter read one of the three diary events and asked the participants to report two personal memories1, either general or specific, that were evoked by that event. Following Williams (1996), specific memories were defined as personal events that occurred at a particular place and time and that lasted less than a day. General memories were defined as summaries of repeated events or events extending over more than a day. Second, participants were asked to rate the emotional intensity associated with the event evoked by each of these personal memories. There was no reliable difference in intensity between the specific and general memories (M = 3.95, S.D. = 2.88, for specific memories, and M = 4.04, S.D. = 1.69, for general memories) 2. Third, the association task was followed by a distraction task, during which participants were asked to solve logic problems. The order in which the three diary events were presented in the association task was random.
Schematic versus propositional processing p. 13 Experimental task. This task proceeded in three stages. First, the experimenter read the diary event to the participants and asked the participants to re-evoke one of the associated memories, which was then also read by the experimenter during 10 sec. After a delay of 20 sec., the other associated memory was read during 10 sec., and the participant was instructed to reevoke it for 20 sec. This priming stage lasted 60 sec. According to the priming condition, either general or specific AM were read and re-evoked; in the control condition, participants performed a semantic task for 60 sec.: They had to give synonyms or antonyms of common French words. The mental imagery task began immediately after priming. The diary event was read again, and the participants were instructed to re-evoke it as intensely as possible for 20 sec. Then, in the rating stage, they filled in the emotional intensity scale and a scale assessing the difficulty of the task (from 0 “no difficulty at all” to 10 “extremely difficult”). This procedure was followed for each of the three events, in the same order as the random order of the association task. Each event was randomly assigned to the general, specific, or control priming condition. Finally, the experimenter fully debriefed the participants, answered their questions about the study, and thanked them for their participation. Results An ANOVA with Experimental Condition (control vs. specific AM vs. general AM priming) as within-subject factor was computed on the emotion intensity scores. The effect of Experimental Condition was significant, F(2,43)=4.21, p
