Consequences of Specific Processing of Emotional Information: Impact of General Versus Specific Autobiographical Memory Priming on Emotion Elicitation Pierre Philippot, Alexandre Schaefer, and Gwe ´nola Herbette Universite ´ de Louvain The relation between emotion intensity and the voluntary activation of personal memories was investigated in 2 experiments. Two hypotheses were compared: the specificity hypothesis, which states that emotion intensity is positively related to the specificity of personal memories, and the strategic inhibition hypothesis, which postulates that specifying past experiences requires the inhibition of emotion. Study 1 showed that priming a specific (vs. overgeneral) access mode to autobiographical memory results in less emotion during a subsequent mental imagery trial. Study 2 replicated Study 1 with a wider array of emotions and a different method of emotion induction (films). Overall, results support the strategic inhibition hypoth- esis. The notion of specificity is discussed as well as implications for cognitive theories of emotion and their clinical applications. I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body . . . An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, de- tached, with no suggestion of its origin.... Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? . . . And suddenly, the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of Madeleine which on Sunday morning at Combray . . ., when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea (Proust, 1913/1957, pp. 56–58). In everyday life, seemingly trivial events can trig- ger distinct emotional feelings because they evoke memories of past emotional experiences. In this fa- mous excerpt from one of Proust’s novels, the simple taste of a biscuit evokes memories of the past in the character, who re-experiences emotions he lived years ago. From their own observations, most people would admit that memories of past experiences are an im- portant determinant in the attribution of an emotional meaning to a given situation. With very few exceptions (e.g., Arnold, 1950; Mandler, 1984), this common-sense evidence has not received much attention from emotion theorists. (For a review of this point, see Philippot & Schaefer, 2001.) Indeed, most recent approaches to emotion and memory have focused on how emotion influences memory, not on memory processes’ involvement in emotion (e.g., Christianson & Safer, 1996; Destun & Kuiper, 1999; Ochsner, 2000). Further, the role of episodic memory processes has not been considered explicitly by theories of emotional appraisal. Thus, to date, our theoretical understanding of the role of per- sonal memories in the elicitation and regulation of emotion is still incomplete and has not incorporated recent advances in cognitive models of autobiographi- cal memory (AM; e.g., Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Rubin, 1996). At the empirical level, however, recent clinical studies have documented interesting relationships be- tween chronic emotional states and episodic memory processes. Specifically, Williams (1996; Williams, Stiles, & Shapiro, 1999) has shown that depression is associated with an overgeneral retrieval mode for per- sonal memories, whatever the emotional tone of the Pierre Philippot, Alexandre Schaefer, and Gwe ´nola Her- bette, Faculte ´ de Psychologie, Universite ´ de Louvain, Lou- vain-la-Neuve, Belgium. The writing of this article has been facilitated by Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique [Na- tional Fund for Research Science of Belgium] Grants 8.4508.95 and 8.4512.98. We are grateful to Martin Conway for his comments on an earlier version of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to Pierre Philippot, Faculte ´ de Psychologie, Univer- site ´ de Louvain, 10 Place du Cardinal Mercier, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. E-mail: pierre.philippot@psp .ucl.ac.be Emotion Copyright 2003 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 2003, Vol. 3, No. 3, 270–283 1528-3542/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1528-3542.3.3.270 270