Success and Failure at Implementing Cognitive Reappraisal Modulates the Magnitude of the Emotional Memory Trade-Off Effect

Cognitive reappraisal involves reinterpreting a situation's meaning to reduce its emotional impact. We investigated how cognitive reappraisal affects emotional memory trade-off effects (i.e., the prioritization of emotional over neutral information in memory). Given that people sometimes fail to generate reappraisals and that failure is associated with higher arousal, we preregistered the hypotheses that successful reappraisal would reduce the trade-off effect, whereas failure would enhance it. To test this, participants viewed negative and neutral scenes and were sometimes instructed to use cognitive reappraisal to decrease their emotions to negative scenes. After a 24-hr delay, recognition memory for the scenes' objects and backgrounds was tested. We found that successful reappraisal reduced the trade-off effect, increasing memory for neutral backgrounds co-occurring with negative objects. Conversely, failure enhanced the trade-off effect, increasing memory for negative objects. Thus, cognitive reappraisal differentially enhances aspects of an emotional event, depending on its success or failure.