"Sometimes we dwell on how sad, embarrassed, or hurt we felt during an event,
and that makes us feel worse and worse. This is what happens in clinical
depression-ruminating on the negative aspects of a memory," Dolcos said.

"But we found that instead of thinking about your emotions during a negative
memory, looking away from the worst emotions and thinking about the context,
like a friend who was there, what the weather was like, or anything else
non-emotional that was part of the memory, will rather effortlessly take
your mind away from the unwanted emotions associated with that memory.

“Once you immerse yourself in other details, your mind will wander to
something else entirely, and you won't be focused on the negative emotions
as much."

The strategy is a very promising alternative to other coping mechanisms such
as suppression or reappraisal.

"Suppression is bottling up your emotions, trying to put them away in a box.
This is a strategy that can be effective in the short term, but in the long
run, it increases anxiety and depression," says Dolcos.

"Another otherwise effective emotion regulation strategy, reappraisal, or
looking at the situation differently to see the glass half full, can be
cognitively demanding.

“The strategy of focusing on non-emotional contextual details of a memory, on
the other hand, is as simple as shifting the focus in the mental movie of
your memories and then letting your mind wander."

The strategy can be effective in both the short term and the long term as use
of the mechanism can lead to a reduction of the memory’s emotional impact.
The study was conducted by initially asking the participants to explain
their most negative and positive memories. After several weeks, they were
given cues to trigger memories while being scanned in a magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) machine. They were asked to focus on the emotion and then also
the context of the memory.

"Neurologically, we wanted to know what happened in the brain when people were
using this simple emotion-regulation strategy to deal with negative memories
or enhance the impact of positive memories," explained report co-author
Ekaterina Denkova. "One thing we found is that when participants were
focused on the context of the event, brain regions involved in basic emotion
processing were working together with emotion control regions in order to,
in the end, reduce the emotional impact of these memories."