Effects of anxiety level on directed forgetting of emotional information and related metacognitive judgments

The present study investigated intentional forgetting of emotional information in low vs. high anxiety groups, by using a directed forgetting paradigm. The groups were formed based on their scores on measures of state and trait anxiety. Participants were provided with positive, negative, and neutral photographs with either remember or forget instructions and further provided metacognitive judgments of learning for each photograph, indicating how likely they are to recognize the photograph in a subsequent recognition test. In the recognition test, they identified the photographs that they had seen in the learning session, irrespective of instruction. The results showed that directed forgetting was only observed in the high anxiety group. Furthermore, higher anxiety scores negatively correlated with the recognition of negative to-be-forgotten information, indicating that high anxiety is associated with a better ability to forget negative information. Metacognitive judgments showed awareness of the forget instructions and the valence of the photographs, but they were not affected by anxiety level. The results suggest that the effects of anxiety on cognitive control may be different between participants with higher vs. lower anxiety levels in a non-clinical sample. The results are discussed within several theoretical frameworks which claim that anxiety may lead to the inhibition and avoidance of negatively valenced mental content.