Suppress to Forget: The Effect of a Mindfulness-Based Strategy during an Emotional Item-Directed Forgetting Paradigm

Olga L. Gamboa, Javier Garcia-Campayo, Teresa Müller, Frederic von Wegner

Forgetting is a common phenomenon in everyday life. Although it often has negative connotations, forgetting is an important adaptive mechanism to avoid loading the memory storage with irrelevant information. A very important aspect of forgetting is its interaction with emotion. Affective events are often granted special and priority treatment over neutral ones with regards to memory storage. As a consequence, emotional information is more resistant to extinction than neutral information. It has been suggested that intentional forgetting serves as a mechanism to cope with unwanted or disruptive emotional memories and the main goal of this study was to assess forgetting of emotional auditory material using the item-method directed forgetting (DF) paradigm using a forgetting strategy based on mindfulness as a means to enhance DF. Contrary to our prediction, the mindfulness-based strategy not only did not improve DF but reduced it for neutral material. These results suggest that an interaction between processes such as response inhibition and attention is required for intentional forgetting to succeed.