The easiest way to get past negative memories is to think about the circumstance rather the feelings associated with it, a new research states.
Researchers examined the behavioral and neural mechanism of focusing away from emotions while recalling personal emotional memories. They found that thinking about the contextual part of the memories significantly lowered the emotional impact in people.
"Sometimes we dwell on how sad, embarrassed, or hurt we felt during an event, and that makes us feel worse and worse. This is what happens in clinical depression-ruminating on the negative aspects of a memory," said psychology professor Florin Dolcos of the Cognitive Neuroscience Group, in the press release.
The study analysis showed that thinking about circumstance of the negative memories such as a friend who was present at the time, what the weather was like, or any non-emotional aspect of the memory takes the mind away from the negative emotions. Dolcos explains, "Once you immerse yourself in other details, your mind will wander to something else entirely, and you won't be focused on the negative emotions as much."
The researchers state that this approach is a promising option to other emotion-regulation strategies such as suppression or reappraisal.
Suppression is mounting the memories up and then shutting them in a box. "This is a strategy that can be effective in the short term, but in the long run, it increases anxiety and depression," explained Sanda Dolcos, co-author on the study and postdoctoral research associate at the Beckman Institute and in the Department of Psychology.
"Another otherwise effective emotion regulation strategy, reappraisal, or looking at the situation differently to see the glass half full, can be cognitively demanding. The strategy of focusing on non-emotional contextual details of a memory, on the other hand, is as simple as shifting the focus in the mental movie of your memories and then letting your mind wander."
For the study the participants were asked to remember certain positive and negative emotional moments of their lives. Later they were given certain cues to trigger the memories while hooked up to a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The participants were asked to remember the event with either the emotions it evoked or the context. If a person was remembering the funeral of a friend the emotional memory would be the loss and sadness and the contextual memory would be what one wore or who was around.
Using this tactic cuts down the negative memories and promotes positive emotions. The results were published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
