ArticleCommunications psychology2023
Emotional associative memory is disrupted by directed forgetting.
Article in Communications psychology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Mechanisms of Forgetting: A Systematic Review of Neurocognitive and Clinical Determinants.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2026Pooled it
- Forgetting as an active process: Attentional withdrawal following a forget instruction.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Brain mechanisms underlying the inhibitory control of thought.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Top-down instruction outweighs emotional salience: nocturnal sleep physiology indicates selective memory consolidation.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Maintenance suppression reduces the accessibility of visual information in working memory regardless of its normative valence.Frontiers in cognition · 2024Article
- Controlling intrusive thoughts of future fears under stress.Neurobiology of stress · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Memory is susceptible to voluntary disruption, for instance, through directed forgetting manipulations, in which people are cued to intentionally "forget" information. Until now, directed forgetting has been primarily studied for declarative memory performance. Here, we demonstrate that directed forgetting can also disrupt associative memories acquired through fear conditioning. In two experiments, participants showed poorer recognition and recall of images paired with electric shocks when instructed to forget, compared to when instructed to remember them. Further, they also showed weaker skin conductance responses to images paired with shocks that they were instructed to forget, despite repeated, full reinforcement of the aversive outcome. Our findings provide evidence for the effect of directed forgetting not only on declarative but also physiological read-outs of emotional memory, thereby suggesting that forgetting instructions can be applied to interfere with emotional associative memory.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.