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Feel Less, Remember Less: The Blunting-Induced Forgetting Effect

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Mohith Verma¹ (mohith.verma@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk), Michael Anderson¹; ¹MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge

This study explored whether people can intentionally reduce the emotional impact of unwanted memories and whether this relies on inhibitory control. Research on retrieval suppression demonstrates that stopping memory retrieval disrupts hippocampal reinstatement and leads to forgetting. However, it remains unclear whether similar control mechanisms can directly regulate negative affect. We addressed this gap by experimentally testing affect stopping. Affect stopping refers to deliberate cancellation of emotional responses when confronted with reminders that normally evoke distress because of their association with a negative memory. Affect stopping is hypothesised to draw on inhibitory control that halts the reactivation of negative affect. Our aim was to determine whether inhibiting affect also disrupts access to the underlying memory, giving rise to blunting-induced forgetting. Forty-eight participants completed a Feel/No-Feel (FNF) paradigm. They first learned associations between negative scenes and two cues: a related object cue embedded within the scene, and an independent word cue unrelated to the content. During the critical FNF phase, green-framed cues signalled participants to experience the associated feelings (“Feel”), whereas red-framed cues instructed them to block those feelings and remain neutral (“No-Feel”) with no reference made to suppressing the memory. Participants rated unpleasantness on each trial. Affect stopping reliably reduced unpleasantness (p < .001, ηₚ² = .12) and, critically, impaired recall of specific details of the scenes and their broader content (all pbonferroni ≤ .001; dz = .63-.99). These findings suggest that affect stopping recruits inhibitory mechanisms that blunt affect while also weakening access to unwanted memories.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions