Affect Labeling During Pictorial Encoding Enhances Their Recognition and Reduces Amygdalar Responses to Negative...

Affect labeling, which entails identifying the emotional content of an event, is a critical strategy for implicit emotion regulation. Previous studies have shown that affect labeling influences the encoding memory stage of negative events. However, it remains unclear whether affect labeling during encoding of negative events affects subsequent memory stages related to these events, such as retrieval.

The current behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aimed to investigate whether affect labeling during encoding of emotional pictures influenced behavioral performance and neural responses during recognition memory of these pictures. To address this issue, 37 participants in the present study were instructed to label the emotional content of negative or neutral pictures, label the person-related content, or simply view the pictures. Participants were then re-exposed to the pictures along with several new ones and were asked to indicate whether they had previously seen each prompted picture.

Behavioral results showed that affect labeling during pictorial encoding subsequently increased recognition performance across all pictures. fMRI results revealed that during the encoding phase, negative pictures in the affect labeling condition elicited greater amygdala activation compared to the person labeling and viewing conditions, with this effect being even more pronounced relative to neutral pictures. More importantly, during the recognition phase, prior affect labeling reduced amygdalar responses specifically to negative pictures, which made comparable the responses observed for neutral pictures.

These findings suggest that affect labeling during encoding of negative events modulates their memory formation, thereby influencing subsequent retrieval of those events.