Beyond fear: dual task interventions are effective for fear and non-fear memories

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is no longer conceptualised solely as a fear-based condition, as traumatic memories often involve other emotions (shame, anger, and sadness). Although the dominant emotion of a memory is routinely assessed in the EMDR protocol, treatment progress is typically tracked via overall distress (SUD), and research has rarely examined whether the dual-task affects memories beyond fear. Yet emotions vary in arousal, approach/avoidance direction, and self-relevance, suggesting that the magnitude of dual-task effects may depend on the dominant emotion. As a first step, the present online proof-of-principle study investigated whether the dominant emotion of an autobiographical memory moderates dual-task effectiveness. To test this, participants (N = 560) were randomly assigned to recall a memory characterised by fear, shame, anger, or sadness, and then received either Recall + Dual Task (eye movements) or Recall Only as intervention. Memory vividness, unpleasantness, and accessibility were rated before and after the intervention. We found that across emotions, Recall + Dual Task resulted in the largest declines in vividness and unpleasantness (and somewhat in accessibility) compared to Recall Only. Emotional memory type did not reliably moderate the intervention. These findings tentatively suggest that dual-task interventions can be applied to emotionally diverse autobiographical memories, supporting their use beyond fear-dominated trauma memories.