The influence of self-regulatory focus on encoding of, and memory for, emotional words

We investigated self-regulatory focus (Higgins, 199728. Higgins , E. T. 1997 . Beyond pleasure and pain . American Psychologist , 52 ( 12 ) : 1280 – 1300 .
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View all references, 199829. Higgins , E. T. 1998 . Promotion and prevention: Regulatory focus as a motivational principle . Advances in Experimental Social Psychology , 46 : 1 – 46 .
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View all references) as one source of variation in encoding of, and memory for, emotional words. Participants wrote about their hopes and aspirations (promotion focus) or duties and obligations (prevention focus). In a subsequent incidental encoding task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants evaluated emotional (positive and negative) and neutral words as either good or bad. A surprise memory test followed, outside the scanner. We observed a dissociation in posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), where activity during the evaluation task was greater when words were focus-consistent (positive for the promotion focus group, negative for the prevention focus group). Similarly, activity in a parahippocampal region was related to subsequent memory, but only for focus-consistent words. Given the role of the PCC in self-referential processing and episodic retrieval, and the parahippocampus in memory-related processing, these data suggest that regulatory focus influences which items are preferentially associated with self-referential information in memory. Such preferential processing may help explain why events are remembered differently by different individuals, which subsequently may influence interpersonal interactions.