Emotional Influences on Remembering and Forgetting Explained by Frontal and Parietal Dynamics

Based on item-method directed forgetting (DF) task, sixty participants were recruited to explore the influence of emotion (negative, neutral, and positive) on memory encoding processing. Behavioral results showed that participants were more successful at remembering negative pictures that needed to be forgotten, with both higher recognition rates and Pr values compared to neutral pictures. In the brain, parietal activities reflected preferential processing during negative picture viewing through enhanced late parietal positive potentials (LPP) relative to neutral ones. In addition, ‘Remember’ (R) instruction evoked a larger parietal P3 component, whereas ‘Forget’ (F) instruction evoked a stronger frontal N2 component, each of which component was significantly associated with the DF effect (i.e., more recognized items of R-cue than that of F-cue), reflecting the fact that inhibitory control and selective rehearsal mechanisms were jointly responsible for the directed forgetting of emotional materials. Finally, we showed the presence of instruction-evoked low-frequency phase synchronization between frontal and parietal regions, and that these synchronization patterns differed between R-cue and F-cue in an emotion-dependent manner. Together, these findings reveal cognitive mechanisms and specific patterns of large-scale phase synchronization underlying active forgetting of emotional memories, deepening our comprehension into the interplay between cognition and emotion.