Reconsolidation of emotional memories in psychotherapy: How corrective emotional experiences facilitate enduring change

In recent years, there have been exciting developments in basic memory research demonstrating that memories are not fixed but are modifiable under certain circumstances, a phenomenon known as memory reconsolidation. This discovery creates the opportunity for the blueprints of behavior to be altered in a way that will result in enduring change. Moreover, it is now understood that semantic memories are a distillation of episodic (event) experiences, which means that certain kinds of episodic experiences in psychotherapy, particularly ones that are emotionally potent, can alter and potentially transform semantic memories. Corrective experiences, a concept originating in the psychodynamic tradition, has recently garnered increasing interest as a foundational change mechanism applicable to multiple psychotherapeutic modalities. Neurobiological approaches to memory–emotion interactions highlight the arousal aspect of emotion, which is associated with increases in cortisol and norepinephrine that promote synaptic changes that enhance memory encoding. Although well established, these molecular mechanisms do not address the content of the memory that is so encoded. This chapter will extend this perspective by highlighting the appraisal aspect of emotion, and its relevance to altering the implicit construal of problematic situations through a predictive processing mechanism. This focus shifts the emphasis to the meaning that is inherent in corrective emotional experiences that update a type of semantic memory called schematic memory, leading to alterations in the construals and behavioral responses these revised schemas generate. As such this theoretical advance helps to explain why new emotional experiences in psychotherapy may be even more important than the patient's enhanced understanding in promoting change and provides a neurobiologically informed explanation for how corrective emotional experiences work.