Controlling unwanted memories: A conceptual review grounded in the process model of emotion regulation

Autobiographical memories are a crucial source of emotional states in our daily lives. While remembering negative events in the past is important to guide future behaviours and steer us away from harm, being reminded of unpleasant events too often or too intensely can have a serious impact on our wellbeing. A solution that may reconcile these positive and negative effects of negative memories is memory control. Being able to control when, how, and which memories to remember, based on our current goals, is similar to being able to control our emotions, which taps into the well-established field of emotion regulation (ER) where the ER Process Model (Gross, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(1), 224-237 1998b, Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1-26 2015) has been extensively used as a theoretical framework. The memory control field is missing such an overarching model that would provide a guiding framework and new insights for emotional memory control research and practice. In this conceptual review, we bring together three lines of well-established research - on Emotion Regulation, Involuntary Autobiographical Memories, and Memory Control - to demonstrate how the Process Model of ER can be applied to memories. The application of the ER model to emotional memories enhances conceptual clarity of the field of memory control, helps to organise existing findings, reveals meaningful similarities and differences between various memory control strategies, identifies the most potentially effective strategies, and points to the most promising future research directions.