A recent study suggests that emotional regulation can significantly affect their feelings and their own emotional memories.

This could lead to new interventions for depression.
Advertising message A recent study, published in the journal Neuropsychologia, it investigated how emotional regulation affects feelings and bad memories.
The results obtained seem to suggest the possibility of developing new methods of therapeutic intervention for the treatment of depression.
Often the relatives of depressed patients advise them to avoid dwelling too much on negative emotions and to "go beyond", but to take this step is not so simple.
In the present study, the participants were divided into two groups, one control, 17 subjects each, and was monitored the brain activity of subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The monitoring took place while the participants played a task of image evaluation.
The images, 180 in total, were chosen based on neutral or content created specifically to arouse negative emotions.
The first group was asked participants to voluntarily suppress, through explicit directions, the negative emotions arising during the evaluation of the images negativity.
Participants in the second group, however, have received indications able to elicit suppression not aware of the insurgent emotions following the evaluation of the images negativity.
At a distance of one week after administration of the images, the researchers measured the long-term effects of negative images on episodic memory.
In this way, they have therefore been explored both the immediate effects, namely the emotional experience, both the long-term effects, namely the episodic memory, emotional regulation.
It has emerged as the explicit suppression (first group) has been able to reduce negative emotional evaluations of the images.
At the neural level, the explicit suppression is shown with a decrease in activity in the amygdala and in the inferior frontal gyrus.
It has also been registered as both forms of suppression are associated with reduced functional connectivity between the amygdala-hippocampus and among lower-frontal gyrus hippocampus, the brain areas devoted to the encoding of emotional memories.
These results allow an advance in knowledge of the mechanisms of implicit and explicit emotional suppression about the perception and memory, suggesting the impact they have on the top-down and bottom-up mechanisms involved in cognition-emotion interactions.
In addition, the study results show that the immediate effects (emotional experience) change if the suppression is explicit rather than implicit, based on the way the brain processes images.
Only participants who have explicitly suppressed their negative emotions they felt better while viewing negative images.
The long-term effects (episodic memory), however, are similar whether in a case that another.
At a distance of one week of viewing images, in fact, both explicit and implicit suppression have reduced the ability of the participants to remember the images.
Advertising message This study and the results provide some useful information to help us understand how to cope with the symptoms of depression or other mood disorders as "suppress emotions seems to reduce negative memories, whether it is done consciously or unconsciously, "says Katsumi.
Still, it is not always possible for everyone to refer to explicit suppression, as it is a process that requires significant effort from the cognitive point of view and often people in clinical conditions do not have the energy to draw on its knowledge resources.

From Stateofmind