Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Emotion regulation (ER) is the process by which we use a varied collection of strategies to modify aspects of an emotional response. While an innate skill for most individuals, impairments in emotion regulation are pronounced in individuals with severe mental disorders. As one in five Canadians are expected to suffer from a mental disorder in their lifetime, a better understanding of the use of effective ER strategies is vital. The study of ER strategies is especially important in the context of emotional memory, as one's ability to recall memories is impacted by the strategy one uses at the time of encoding. However, there is a paucity of research on which strategies are most effective for modulating an unwanted emotional response while still retaining memory for the event. The proposed research addresses this paucity by conducting two studies, both of which use a variation of a well-established ER task known as the Enhance/Maintain/Suppress paradigm in which participants view emotional images and are asked to either enhance, maintain, or suppress their emotional responses to the images. Memory for the images will be tested via the Remember-Know procedure, a test of recollection and familiarity. This research will thus inform of both the impact of ER strategy timing and the effectiveness of two different strategy types on memory for emotional stimuli. Furthermore, it will provide a theoretical platform for integration of ER strategies into treatments for psychopathology.