Suppressing Emotional Memories

Emotional memories enrich our lives by anchoring us to meaningful past events, but they can also become intrusive and distressing, particularly in psychiatric conditions. This chapter discusses retrieval stopping, a memory control process through which individuals actively stop or cancel the retrieval of unwanted memories when confronted with reminders. We synthesize findings from retrieval stopping studies focussing on how people suppress the retrieval of emotional memories and the resulting consequences for both memory and emotion. Our review reveals that retrieval stopping consistently impairs recall of emotional memories in healthy populations, though this capacity is compromised in clinical groups and under conditions that impair inhibitory control, such as acute stress and sleep deprivation. Neuroimaging evidence demonstrates that suppressing emotional memories engages a fronto-temporal inhibitory control pathway, with increased activation in right anterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex alongside decreased activity in hippocampus and amygdala. Retrieval stopping induces mixed after-effects on subjective reports of valence of the suppressed content, but more reliably reduces self-reported and physiological indicators of arousal. We propose a theoretical model suggesting that retrieval and affect stopping are co-engaged processes when dealing with unwanted emotional memories and thoughts, both relying on shared inhibitory control mechanisms to prevent neural reinstatement of the original trace. This integrated perspective emphasizes that regulating emotional memories requires interrupting the neural reinstatement of both their mnemonic and affective components. By framing inhibitory control as a central mechanism linking the regulation of memory and emotion, the model offers a unifying account for understanding how individuals manage unwanted memories and the emotional distress they evoke.