How emotions influence mental visualization through the motivation to forget

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Affective Science
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Emotion regulation theory suggests individuals are motivated to forget negative experiences.
• Previous research indicates associations between color and emotion in perception.
• The impact of emotion on the vividness of mental imagery remains less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how sadness versus happiness influences color chroma in mental visualization.
• To explore the role of motivation to forget in emotion-color chroma relationships.
• To examine whether prompting to forget alters emotion-induced changes in visual imagery.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted with 939 participants.
• Participants visualized sad and happy emotional events.
• Color chroma, motivation to forget, and explicit forgetting prompts were measured.

Main Results:

• Sad experiences were visualized with significantly lower color chroma than happy experiences.
• Motivation to forget mediated the relationship between emotion type and color chroma.
• Explicitly prompting participants to forget mitigated the effect of emotion on color chroma.

Conclusions:

• Emotional valence influences the vividness of mental imagery, with sadness associated with reduced color chroma.
• Motivational processes, specifically the drive to forget, play a key role in shaping visual representations of emotional memories.
• This study offers a novel explanation for the emotion-color association in mental visualization.