Who is your worst memory? What makes you feel? According to psychologists from the Institute Beckmann, remembering the emotions outlived during negative personal experience, such as how sad you were or how you felt uncomfortable, can lead to emotional stress, especially when you can not stop thinking about it.
When these negative memories you hold of thinking about the context of the memories, not how you feel, is relatively easy and effective way to reduce the negative effects of those memories.
Researchers at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, led by psychology professor Florin Dolkos, studied the behavior and neural mechanisms focus on the excitement of memory and found that thinking about the contextual elements of memories significantly reduces their emotional impact.
"Sometimes I fix on how sad, embarrassed or hurt we felt during an event, and this makes us feel worse and worse. This is what happens in clinical depression - experience on the negative aspects of memory, "says Dolkos. "But we found that if instead of thinking about our negative emotions, break away from them and think about the context, such as a friend who was there, what was the weather or something else, not emotionally, which was part the memory, it easily distracts us from unwanted emotions associated with that memory. When jumping into other details, our mind thinks about them and distract us from negative emotions. "
The study shows that this simple strategy is a promising alternative to other emotionally-regulating strategies to suppress or revaluation.
"Repression is bottling emotions, trying to leave them in a box away from us. This is a strategy that can be effective in the short term but in the long run, increased anxiety and depression," explains Sanda Dolkos, co-author of the study and postdoctoral research associate at the Institute Beckmann and the Department of Psychology.
"Another effective strategy is to control emotions revaluation, or review the situation in a different way to see the glass half full or cognitively demanding. The strategy of focusing on non-emotional contextual details of memory, on the other hand, is as simple as shifting of focus mental variety of your memories and then to release your mind. "
Away from the worst emotions and thoughts about the context, as a friend who was there or what the weather was no effort you put off unwanted emotions associated with negative memory.
This strategy allows not only for the effective regulation of short-term emotion, but also reduces the negative memory dalgostochen plan.
In the study, participants were asked to share their most negative and positive emotional memories, the birth of a child, won a prize or omitted examination, said Sanda Dolkos. Several weeks later, participants received signals that would trigger their memories while their brains were scanned using magnetic resonance imaging. Before each memory, participants were asked to remember each event, focusing on emotion or relating to the event or on the context. For example, if you cause memory for the funeral of a close friend, thinking about the emotional context will remember grief at the event. If you were asked, however, to remember contextual elements may instead remember what clothing you wore or what you ate that day.
"Neurological, we want to know what happens in the brain when people use this simple emotional control strategy for dealing with negative memories or enhance the effects of positive memories," said Ekaterina Denkova, first author of the report. "One thing we found is that when participants are focused on the context of the event, the areas of the brain involved in emotion processing core have worked together with controlled emotion, to reduce the emotional impact of these memories."
In the future, scientists hope to determine whether this strategy is effective in reducing the negative memories in the long run. They also hope to work with clinically depressed or anxious participants to determine whether this strategy is effective to relieve such psychiatric conditions.