Effect of Acute Exercise on the Directed Forgetting of Negative Emotional Information

Objective: To explore whether acute exercise can act as an intervention in the directed forgetting of negative emotional information in college students, and then to investigate the influence of emotional materials and temporal coupling on this process.Methods: A total of 102 female college students were randomly divided into before-encoding exercise group, after-encoding exercise group and control group. The intervention protocol was 10-minute moderate intensity continuous exercise. Based on the item method of directed forgetting paradigm, the low arousal negative words, high arousal negative words, and neutral words were used as memory materials. The number of correct free recall, the discrimination index d', and the corresponding directed forgetting values were compared. Results: The DF value of the before-encoding exercise group in the recognition task was significantly higher than that of the control group, mainly reflected in the significantly lower d' of the before-encoding exercise group under the forget instruction. The corrected free recall number of after-encoding exercise group was lower than that of the before-encoding exercise group and the control group. Conclusions: Before-encoding exercise promote the directed forgetting by improving the suppression ability of forget instruction information, and after-encoding exercise reduces the memory performance indiscriminate by interfering the memory consolidation process. It is suggested that acute exercise can enhance individual's ability in suppressing memory encoding of negative emotional information, and acute exercise can also help individuals to forget negative information quickly after experiencing negative emotional events.