Escape the past: A cue to forget emotional memories

Emotional memories are at the root of anxiety-related disorders, yet current interventions aimed at modifying such memories suffer from a lack of long-lasting, persistent effects, allowing for the gradual return of anxiety complaints. This highlights the need for novel methods to manipulate emotional memories, to help people forget burdensome events. Directed forgetting manipulations have been repeatedly applied in declarative memory research to investigate intentional, instructed forgetting. We recently developed a novel directed forgetting fear conditioning procedure aimed at examining instructed forgetting of emotional, rather than declarative memories. In a series of studies, we observed a clear memory deficit for items that were instructed to be forgotten during encoding, as well as an attenuation of physiological fear expression in relation to those items. While this work holds tremendous potential for memory therapeutics, many fundamental questions remain unanswered. This proposal aspires to corroborate and expand these initial findings by a) manipulating experiment-specific and biological factors that may play a role in the observation of the directed forgetting effect, b) investigating individual characteristics hypothesized to facilitate and impede directed forgetting, and c) exploiting directed forgetting to disrupt the expression of previously acquired memories upon their retrieval rather than initial encoding.